What you need to know about web 2.0 and its benefits for education!

Web 1.0 was the beginning of Internet as we know it. Its name stands for World Wide Web and at the time, people could only look for information, but there wasn't a great variety of types of interaction like nowadays. On the other hand, Web 2.0 has a wide range of resources and activities to do on the net, including teaching tools!

In this day and age, users of the Internet not only look for information but they also share their work, create their own materials, collect different data, etc.

 

The most popular examples of web 2.0 are Twitter and YouTube, among many others.

Twitter is a real-time network that connects millions of people. YouTube is the world's most popular online video sharing website. So, the big question is: how could we use them for our teaching purposes?

In Twitter you can search for information. You can publish and share your own ideas in real time. You retweet and recycle resources that might be interesting not only for yourself, but also for your followers. In other words, Twitter is a great way for educators to share information, ideas and experiences. María Colussa is a great example of an educational use of Twitter. She is constantly sharing her materials and learning experiences. You can see it with your own eyes here: 

https://twitter.com/mariacolussa

In the classroom students can also profit from Twitter. They can post information about future deadlines and homework. They can also write collaboratively in order to create a story or you can create a hashtag (for example: #thinkingabouteco2) for students to talk about a specific topic. Students can take pictures of their everyday life and post them on twitter in order to write a small description and share it with their classmates, and things like that.

YouTube is a different story. It is sorted to show videos from educational institutions like universities and schools. That’s where we found The Khan Academy, created by Salman Khan. He has almost 26 millions of students on line. Khan says that "Khan Academy is on a mission to unlock the world's potential". In a TED conference in 2011 he said that "students prefer him to be on YouTube that in person". Here is the Khan Academy Channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy
 

In the classroom, we can use YouTube for many purposes. Students can listen to and watch different videos in order to describe them, compare or contrast them. They can also use it as a tool to upload their own videos, that is to say their own creations. And last but not least, to look for information and interesting channels related to specific topics or learning purposes.

To sum up, we would like to say that though technology is being used mainly for communication nowadays, learning and teaching also have their place on the net. For us, the main purpose in using this technology would be to keep students as curious and stimulated as possible so that they take every advantage they can of the Web 2.0.