A blog
A blog is a asynchronous collaboration tool that allows anyone to express ideas and make content available to others on the Web in a simple way, as a logbook, but is written with the consistency you want. Let´s look at other features of blogs can be useful from a educational point of view.
Usually blogs are environments:
- Collaborative: as they allow other Internet users add comments to entries initiated by the creator of the blog.
- Definable: meaning it can be defined who may add comments, which makes it possible to create restricted environments even while they are public and visible to any web user. This feature can be useful if you want to limit participation to a particular set of students.
- Interactive: since they can be linked to other web sites, videos, audios, etc, providing access to other content and enabling the implementation of other skills. Some sites allow you to upload audio files (podcast).
- Free: at least there are a number of spaces to create blogs that do not even include any advertising.
A wiki
A wiki is a web that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor (is an acronym for What You See is What You Get). The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content (text and graphics) displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form exactly corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product which might be a printed document, web page or slide presentation. Wiki may serve many different purposes. Some permit control over different functions (levels of access). For example, editing rights may permit changing, adding or removing material. Other may permit access without enforcing access control. Others rules may also be imposed for organizing content.
So what can we used Web 2.0?- Weblogs
- Additional or new library resources
- Introduce members of staff
- Use it as a repository of data and information by using categories and tags
- Don´t regard a weblog as a diary- it is an important web site in its own right
- Encourage people to add the feed to their start page or RSS reader
- Create a different weblog for a different subject area- invite others authors
- Use it in a different way on a different page
There are some interesting school weblogs that you can see in my page " Resources for teachers".
