Maria Pazlopez's List: Web 2.0

Wiggio is a website that offers tools for group work and collaboration. On Wiggio, users can share and edit files, manage a group calendar, create and conduct polls/surveys, post links, set up conference calls, chat online, and send text, voice and email messages to group members. Each group member can set up how they will be informed of any group activity. Student groups can be created by a teacher and Wiggio could be used for collaborative projects in the classroom. One of the best features of Wiggio was its relative ease of use, which I found appealing for using with middle school students.

PodOmatic is a website for creating and sharing podcasts. A podcast is an audio or video file that is published and released in episodes. PodOmatic offers two types of accounts, a basic account that is free and a Pro account that has a premium. PodOmatic is open to all users. If students are allowed to log in without supervision, they could encounter potentially offensive material or language. However, PodOmatic does have a podcast page for education and another page for kids/family. These pages offer safer options for students. The user can also set who can view/listen to the podcast, so a student's work does not need to be open for public scrutiny and comment.

Pixton is a website for creating online comics by clicking and dragging from a wide variety of panels, characters, characters' features, props, images, settings, backgrounds, voice, and sound. Pixton was named one of the "Top 100 Websites of 2010 by PCMag.com". Pixton has a specific site for educators called Pixton for Schools. Pixton for Schools lets teachers customize settings to control what students can see or do, allows teachers to moderate student work, and has a project bank for teachers to use or teachers can create their own collaborative or individual projects. Pixton allows students to create, publish and share comics they have created. There is a free 14-day trial for educators and a pricing schedule is available to calculate cost based on the numbers of users and duration of time in months.

ccMixter is a community music website featuring music remixes licensed under Creative Commons. You can download music and then upload your own remix or mashup. This is all done legally under the Creative Commons licenses. The website spotlights remixes, samples, a cappellas, playlists, and podcasts. My 5th and 6th grade students would find this website very exciting just for listening. ccMixter could also be used with students for appreciating and learning the process involved in creating new music. In addition, students and teachers can use dig.ccMixter to search for music that can be used in projects, presentations, movies or videos, games or podcasts. Dig.ccMixter also offers podsafe music and instrumental music for videos, films, and soundtracks.

Jamendo is a music sharing site that offers free and legal music downloads published under Creative Commons licenses. Jamendo advertises that it offers the "largest catalog of music under Creative Commons licenses". Artists can publish, share and promote their music on the website. After creating an account, downloading music seems to be easy. Direct downloads are in mp3 format. You can edit preferences for downloading and streaming options. Once you have downloaded music, the file is saved on your hard drive. Some music is licensed as commercial and you will need to purchase it. This site has a number of uses for educators and students. Often people use commercial songs in presentations and videos without permission. Jamendo offers music that is free to be used by teachers and students depending on the Creative Commons license. Teachers could also use the site with music students to illustrate the process for publishing and promoting original music.

Flickr is a photo and video hosting website. Flickr offers two kinds of accounts for uploading photos and video. One is free and the other is Pro for which you pay a premium. Photos can be submitted, tagged, and organized into sets and collections. Visitors to Flickr can browse and search for photos. Many of Flickr's users have opted to use Creative Common licenses. With this option users have created a database of categorized images for use under the various CC licenses. Included in the database are images from several museums and archived collections that use a "no known restrictions" license. When you go into Flickr, use the advanced search option. You can search for images using words, tags, content type, media type, date and Creative Commons license. There is also a filtering option, SafeSearch, which restricts images that have been noted as potentially offensive. Flickr can be used by educators to teach students how to tag and use folksonomies. Both teachers and students can use Flickr to locate images and video for use in presentations, PowerPoints, Slideshares, and in blogs or on websites. Flickr also uses geotagging. Geotags match photos to location using Google Maps. This could be effectively used in geography lessons.

Great wiki on VoiceThread, uses and evaluation of VoiceThreads. Includes tutorials.

Explains uses for college portfolio websites like Zinch.

This website contains a number of rubrics helpful for assessing Web2.0 projects, such as podcasts, microblogging, class web pages. Also includes rubrics for team work, time managment.

Tagxedo turns words - famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters - into a visually stunning word cloud

Create your own educational games, quizzes, surveys, and web pages. Search millions of games and quizzes created by educators around the world.