Developing web 2.0 technologies reflect the latest and the current trend in education. It encourages one of the most important skills of the 21st century “collaboration”, increases motivation, imagination and the community in a classroom. It helps to develop different skills of children. Many of the web based tools are excellent environments and valuable sources for teaching and learning and many of the tools can be a great digital source for homework.

Here are my web 2.0 suggestions to traditional homework:

Wallwisher is an online page where you can post messages. You click and write your text and you don’t need to register to use the site. You can also add images, video and music to your message. Children can use it for note-taking, to create invitations, make announcements, brainstorm on different topics, report books, collect ideas, showcase what they have done and share resources.

Voki is a tool to create speaking avatars with your own voice. You choose your avatar, you customize it by changing the hair,  clothing, accessories and the colour of the hair, eyes and skin. When you finish, you give it a voice by recording your voice by phone or using a microphone. You can also upload an audio file or you use text-to-speech feature to convert your text into speech choosing the gender and the accent. When you finish, you can get a link or the embed code to publish it on your blog or your website. Children can listen to a story and answer the questions, they can listen to a song and complete the missing words or we can use voki for dictation assignments. Children can record their voices answering a question or retelling a story.

EduGlogster is a tool to create online visual posters that are called glogs. You can add text, images, music and video to your interactive glog. Children can create collaborative interactive posters on any topic, they can write book reports, create advertisement, write and add pictures about a research, prepare a book cover, create a newsletter, introduce a famous person.

Voicethread is a site to create collaborative and multimedia  slides that you can navigate and leave comments for. Each slide can hold images, videos or documents such as PDF, Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents  that can be commented by the people you choose to share your Voicethread. You can write a text, record your voice using a microphone or telephone, film yourself using your web cam or upload an audio file to comment. You can draw as you record your comment. Viewers can see your doodling on the slide as they watch your comment. You can moderate comments before you publish them. Children can talk about a picture, brainstorm on different ideas, discuss a topic or a video they have watched, retell a story, talk about what they did last week/summer holiday, give feedback to their friends, make sentences using the new learnt vocabulary . You can also use this tool for drilling and practicing the language they have learnt at class.

Vocaroo is a tool to record your voice and share it with others. When you finish your recording, you get a link to share the recording with others. It’s also embeddable. Children can practice their pronunciation skills, record their voices while answering a questions, retelling a story, singing a song or they can listen to the recording and answer the questions, write an ending to the story, complete the blanks in the story.

Voxopop is a tool to create online discussion talk groups. You can consider this tool as a forum that uses voice instead of text. Children can record their voices to discuss a particular topic, they can be asked to tell a  continued story by recording their voices. This tool can be used as a listening activity. Children can listen and answer the questions related to the listening, end the story in a different way, this tool is also can be used for dictation activities.

Zimmertwins is a simple site to make great and fun animated stories. You can start making your animation from scratch or you can create your own using one of the story starters. You choose the characters, settings, transitions, actions and emotions by using drag-and-drop feature. After, you only write the text in bubbles. You don’t need any drawing skills to make animations with Zimmertwins. Children can finish Zimmertwins starters by writing or creating a video, children can create their own Zimmertwins stories on different topics using target structures. They can retell a story, make interviews, write dialogues.

Hot Potatoes is a  quiz generator that you can use to create different types of tests for all grades. There are six different interactive web-based test types that you can create. You can choose to have a multiple-choice, short answer, jumbled sentence, crossword, matching/ordering or gap fill exercises.  You can add your own pictures or choose from the clip arts; also you can add mp3 files to your tests. It’s an open source and can be downloaded to any computer.

MixBook is a tool to make customizable photo books, cards and calenders online. You can use different templates, your own pictures, stickers, different layouts and fonts to create your mixbook. You can ask children to create a photo book of their families, vacations, friends, celebrations, favourite websites, history of their country. You can ask them to create their own stories with their own pictures, retell a story, write a poem using pictures. You can also create mixbook with pictures and ask the kids to write the story for it.

Shidonni is a site where students can draw their favorite animal with a world to live in it and see the animal spring to life. Kids take care of their animals by feeding, petting or sending them to sleep. The animal eats the food that kids have drawn for it. They can choose if they want their pet to walk or fly, and they can name it. Kids can draw a background and change it whenever they want. They can play games with their virtual animals or send them to their friends to play with their animals. Children can create their own pets and introduce it to their friends, talk about its one day also keep a diary for their pets.

It’s great to see how technology can facilitate learning and children enjoy while they are doing their homework. Using these tools is sure to increase the creativity and the imagination of the teacher and a great way to catch on with your kids.

This blog or the author are not responsible for any inappropriate images/text/ads of the external links. Please double check before you use it with your students.

Social bookmarking is a great tool to start. It allows you to categorize, access and share the websites easily. It’s the best way to collect the websites you like and keep a list of them and share it with others anytime. Delicious is my favourite social bookmarking tool. It’ specially designed for educators. You can access your favourite websites anywhere, anytime and share it with other people. Stumble Upon, Squidoo and Diigo are the other alternatives to delicious.

On the way of becoming a techie teacher, you are sure to follow many blogs from great educators but it’s difficult to check their websites every single day to see if there is something new posted. RSS readers can help at this point. Google Reader is my favourite feeds reader. You can easily organize one simple page to follow the blogs that you read every day instead of visiting them one by one. Netvibes, PageFlakes and Bloglines are other alternatives.

The most popular and social networking site is the Twitter. You can find amazing educators, teachers, writers on Twitter tweeting about different topics on teaching & learning. Twitter will help you to find new articles and blog posts to read, online conferences to join and to make friends with great people.

Wiki is a place to put text, pictures, links, audios, videos and collaborate with other. Wikispaces is my favourite wiki and it can be a good start if you want to do an online&collaborative project with your class, with other classes or with other educators all around the world.PbWorks can be an alternative.

There are many educational video hosting websites that you can use for professional development or to use in your classes. TeacherTube, EduTube,TeachersTV and SchoolTube can be the best places to start.

You may want to start your own blog to share your experience and knowledge with other people. Edublogs ,WordPress and Blogspot are the sites that you can start your own blog journey.

Of course, the technology will evolve and change every single day, so work hard, collaborate, get inspired and inspire others and be online.

Cross posted on TechLearning.

A habit of mind, something you do every day.(from a discussion at the 1st International Conference on the ePortfolio, Poitiers,France,October 203)

Creating your electronic portfolio may seem to be the most difficult thing to do, but once you start putting together all your life-long collection and start connecting them, you will truly enjoy it. Soon you realize that it’s not only a tool for documenting your achievements and experience but also it’s the best tool for continuous professional development and a way to blow people away with your skills!

Here are some of the Web 2.0 tools that can be used to create your e-portfolio.

Glogsteris my favourite Web 2.0 tool to use when I create my e-portfolio. You can edit links, videos, podcasts,titles and you can choose from so many different colourful widgets. You can change the background or you can decide on your glog wall. Thanks to Glogster, I have a very colourful+cheerful first page on my e-portfolio. You can also use Wixwhich has a similar use like Glogster and can be used as an introduction page on your portfolio. Wix also allows embedding.

If you want to use your videos, you can upload them on Youtube,Vimeo, Dotsub, TeachersTube or BlipTV. Vimeo has become my favourite video sharing site these days. It’s easy,fast and has different embed options. (While you decide on the site that you are going to create your portfolio, you should check if it lets you embed videos, podcast, widgets or other Web 2.0 tools.)

To create online presentations or to share your ready presentations online ,you can have a look at Slideshare, Jogtheweb,Prezi, SlideRocket, Prezentit, SlideSix, 280Slides, Vcasmo, Yodio,, MyPlick, SlideBoom,SlideStory, SPresent.

Voicethreadis an amazing Web 2.0 tool that you can use for any purposes you want. For your e-portfolio, you can use it to get comments from the visitors or you can show others how you have used Voicethread in your lessons.

Why not using polls? Here are my choices : PollDaddy, MicroPoll, PapayaPolls, Survey Monkey.

You can display your pictures of your lessons, projects, seminars, workshops you have attended and you have done by using Slide, BubbleShare, Joggle, MixBook, MyPhotoAlbum, PhotoShow, SlideRoll, PhotoShop, SmileBox.

Voki is another web tool that you can use, you can record your voice and display it with a 3D animated avatar. You can welcome the visitors using it.

You can add some fun to your e-portfolio. You can have a look at Hetemeel, Fodey, Bubbleply, Blabbarize,Dvolver, Gizmoz.

You can create word clouds using Wordle.

What else to include:

• Links of your blog/blogs
• List of some of the web tools that you are using
• List of your favorite sites
• List of your favorite videos
• The sites/blogs/wikis that you are using in your classes
• The links of the projects that you are involved in
• Other websites that you have or you are a member
• Widgets
• Your social bookmarking/Twitter link
• Your CV (You can use VisualCV for this, I like it because it easy and you can add widgets, pictures, hyperlinks,videos)

To read more about e-portfolios, you can have a look at Helen Barrett’s website. She is the guru of portfolios.

I believe once you finish gathering the best package of your whole work (though an e-portfolio will never ever be a complete one as we go on improving ourselves), it will help you to stand out of the crowd. This is what has happened to me!!

* Students make a circle with the first letter of their names or their birthdays.

* Students throw a ball to each other saying their names and when everyone says his/her name, they have to throw the ball back to the person who has thrown them saying their names. Challenging!! 

* Teachers make a circle, everyone says how many years they have worked as a teacher adding the number they have heard from the teacher before them. (We ended up 114 years of experience in teaching. It was great fun!)

* In a circle, students throw a ball to each other saying ‘I like….’, when everyone finishes their sentences, students throw the ball back to the people saying what they said they liked (Danny likes travelling etc.)

* In pairs, students write three words about their lives. It can be their age, their brother’s name, what they like to do, the year they were born etc. The other pair tries to guess what the words mean by asking questions.

* In groups, students try to find a word starting with ‘T’ or ’C' for these sentences.

•  Something that has wheels.
•  Someting that is worked by electricity.
•  Something that you can find at the coast.
•  A sport or a hobby.
•  Something to do with weather.
•  Something that is in your living room.
•  Something that is yellow.
•  Something that you wear in cold weather.

* Teacher gives some questions to the students before the reading activity. Students try to answer the questions with made up answers. When they finish, they retell their story looking at their answers. The good thing is that everyone will end up having a different story. Then teacher gives the real story. What’s your story out of these questions?

1. Where is Minton?
2. How many medical students arrived in Minton?
3. What time of the day did they arrive?
4. What did they tell the landlord of the pub?
5. What did the students do the following weeks?
6. How did the local people feel about the activities of the students?
7. How did the local people stop the young students and get them leave the town?

I can send you the real story, just let me know.

* Teacher starts telling her true story using not more than 3 or 4 sentences then she stops and asks the students to go on telling the rest of the story trying to guess what it may have happened and ended. When they finish telling the story, teacher tells the real story of her own.

* After students read the story, teacher writes some words from the story on the board and asks students to put the words in order as they are in the story without looking at their texts.

* Teacher writes a sentence, a rhyme or a song on the board and reads/sings it with students. Every time they read/sing the text on the board, teacher deletes a word or chunks to make it more difficult and fun for the students to read and remember.

* Students tell the number of the letters of each word as they read it. (Jack/four, and/three, Jill/four,went four, up/two, the/three, hill/four ….)

* After students read a story, teacher divides the class into groups of three and each group members choose to be either A, B or C. Teacher dictates questions adding one of the letters from A,B or C. All the A’s in the class has to write the question whenever they hear ‘A’ letter. The same goes for B’s and C’s. When teacher dictates all the questions, each students answers her/his answers and shares it with the rest of her group. (It was difficult to explain, hope you get it)

* # Students work in pairs. Each pair has six different words on their lists. They try to memorize the words, pairs change their lists and try to remember the words on their lists. # Each pair tells 5 words form the other pair’s words list and they try to remember the 6th word on the list. # Each pair tells 4 words form the other pair’s words list and they try to remember the 5th and the 6th word on the list. #Pairs get their own lists and try to write the other pair’s words on their papers.

* This is a post-reading activity. Teacher divides the class into groups, each group is asked to read one paragraph of the text, then teacher asks each group to write one or two sentences after their paragraph that will not change the story.

* Students expand the story with the adverbs and adjectives that the teacher has given to them.

* Students add one extra character or a scene to the story.

* Teacher gives each student an animal word (sheep, dog, bird, cow etc) Students start walking around the classroom making the noises of these animals. Each students try to find the rest of his/her group by listening to the noises. Students can be given different songs, they hum around and find the rest of their group.

*  Teacher gives each student in the class a letter, A,B,C…. (All the letters of the alphabet should be) . Teacher shouts out one word, e.g DOG. The class try to spell that word by standing up and saying their letters at the right time.

* Teacher lays the pictures of the story on the floor and hands out different parts of the text to students. They try to match the pictures with their texts. When everyone finds the right picture, they read their texts and show their pictures.

* Students choose one sentence from the story and write each word of their sentences on small papers and place them on their desks randomly. Students walk around the class and try to put the words into correct order to find the sentence again.

* Teacher gives different parts of the story to some of the students in the class. They all stand up and face the rest of the class. Each student only read their parts of their story while the rest of the class try to put the story into correct order moving students to the right or to the left and asking them to read their parts.

We can easily make our students read the texts more than once by using these activities and make them understand the it thoroughly. I hope you enjoy and find these activities useful.  

I would like to thank to Philip Franklin, the Coordinator of the Foreign Languages Department of Terakki Vakfi Okullari for this opportunity.