Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms

"We need a solid book explaining and illustrating and letting teachers know about these powerful tools. This book meets the need in an awesome way!" -Mike Muir, Director Maine Center for Meaningful Engaged Learning "This author is a gem! It startles me to be 'pulled' so happily through a text about these new Web tools in the context of good literacy instruction." -Gary Graves, Senior Research and Evaluation Advisor, Technology in Education Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory Discover how to harness Web tools to motivate and update student reading, research and communication! This book brings teachers a bold vision and on-the-ground Monday morning practicality. It will move educators to think differently about technology’s potential for strengthening students' critical thinking, writing, reflection, and interactive learning. Will Richardson demystifies words like "blog," "wiki," and "aggregator" making classroom technology an easily accessible component of classroom research, writing, and learning. This guide demonstrates how Web tools can generate exciting new learning formats, and explains how to apply these tools in the classroom to engage all students in a new world of synchronous information feeds and interactive learning. With detailed, simple explanations, definitions and how-tos, critical information on Internet safety, and helpful links, this exciting book opens an immense toolbox, with specific teaching applications for Web logs, the most widely adopted tool of the read/write Web Wikis, a collaborative Webspace for sharing published content Rich Site Summary (RSS), feeding specific content into the classroom Aggregators, collecting content generated via the RSS feed Social bookmarking, archiving specific Web addresses Online photo galleries This book makes it possible for anyone, no matter how inexperienced, to harness this amazing technology for the classroom today!