Web 2.0 Awards

Hot off the press: Web 2.0 Awards!. We have been using some of the sites listed very successfully in education especially in the area of podcasting, photography, bookmarking, collaborative writing, social networking and tagging. Check out the short list!

Quick reminder to what Web 2.0 stands for:

• user generated and/or user influenced content
• applications that use the Web (versus the desktop) as a platform, in innovative ways
• similar visual design and shared functional languages
• leveraging of popular trends, including blogging, social tagging, wikis, and peer-to-peer sharing
• inclusion of emerging web technologies like RSS, AJAX, APIs (and accompanying mashups), Ruby on Rails and others
• open source or sharable/editable frameworks in the form of user-oriented "create your own" APIs

Vimeo

Got this indication through Isabel Teixeira from Brasilia. Vimeo is a site for organizing and sharing video clips.

Update: First experience - shot some short sequences of my dogs this Sunday MARCH 19TH


View this clip on Vimeo



View this clip on Vimeo

[videoblogs]

Flagr

Flagr is another easy and cool WEb 2.0 tool for "everyone to share where they go, while on the go".

Do it online or through your mobile phone- send in your photos and attach them to your flag.

[Web2.0]

Eslblogs

James Farmer has just launched Eslblog.org , a hosting service which provides "blogs for ESL / EFL students wherever they happen to be". I wonder in which way these blogs will be different from the others. Will they have special features language learners can benefit of, like concordancers, dictionaries, spelling correctors, an embedded podcast facility? I suppose that for the time being, it's just providing the means to gathering a like-minded community, which is already a feat!

Thanks James for thinking of us and hopefully together with Dekita we can network our learners so they can start talking and showing what they can do.

[blogging]

Get Creative

Getting my students acknowledge their sources and making them understand that photographs that they find out there do belong to someone and may be copyright is an uphill battle.

I hope no longer! I have just got mail through Vivência Pedagógica, a Brazilian community of educators interested in exchanging ICT experience and resources. Prof Eziquiel Menta points us to the Portuguese version of Get Creative , an inspired flash animation on Copyright and the Creative Commons License.

I am going to prepare some listening exercises for my English classes (to make sure they understand the message) and have them link this to their blogs (not to forget!)

Help translate the video to your jurisdiction!

PS.: Also watch Reticulum Rex in English or in Portuguese.

[Creative Commons]

Projects and plans

Next Sunday March 5th at 21:00 GMT (check WorldClock for your time ) I will be hosting a Blogstreams Salon event at Tappedin. I will be talking about different blogging projects I am participating in with my classes this year and explaining how to connect your learners to other projects and classes through Dekita.org.

Two hours before, I am meeting Alyne Piazza to discuss the possibility of organizing a BlogTalk in Louvain la Neuve (Belgium) for the Cyberlangues annual meeting. I gave a virtual presentation in 2004 but this time I'd love to meet and chat with everyone f2f, hug my friends, exchange ideas and experience with other bloggers, stroll one night on the Grand Place in Brussels and stop at one of the bistros for some moules and frites. As I am not a great fan of beer, I will have to put up with some French red wine ...

[blogging]