Related reading:

• Are new technologies and social networking sites changing how students write? Writing in the 21st Century, a Report from the NCTE, suggests that we are in a period where "composers become composers not through direct and formal instruction (if at all), but rather through what we might call an extracurricular social co-apprenticeship" (5).

• In the news: "Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology," National Education Technology Plan 2010 (U.S. Dept. of Education)

• "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" by Mark Prensky (2001) - a call for change in how we teach!

The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)
Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University
Posted on YouTube: March 08, 2007 | length 4:34
Description: Now considered the classic video on the concept of "web 2.0" A must see for anyone interested in understanding web 2.0.

Writing and Web 2.0
Keith Hoffman
Posted: May 8, 2007 : length 52
Description: This is presentation Keith Hoffman gave on writing and Web 2.0 at the University of Wisconsin. This podcast is from the series "Tech Writer Voices" by Tom Johnson who podcasts about the latest trends in technical communication through interviews with tech writing luminaries around the world.

Selected list of browsers

Web 2.0 browsers are tabbed, extension-rich, and mostly open source allowing the web community to build tools that enhance and accelerate the online experience.

• Chrome – Google’s browser with tabs that bring search to the address bar
  
• Firefox – One of the best known open source browsers made to handle web 2.0 applications with features such as tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and more. Functions can be added through add-ons, created by third-party developers, a feature that has attracted many of Firefox's users.
  
• Flock –Called the "social browser," Flock les you upload and share photos and videos, blog, and get notices from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009
Jane Hart, Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies
Description: A list of online tools submitting by educational professional. Each tool listed is linked to a page that explains the tool, gives its URL, cost, availability and previous rankings as well as comments by the learning professionals who selected the tool as one of their top 10 tools. This is a great place to survey the online tools educators are using. The CWE uses the categories presented in this list for its categorization of web 2.0 tools. For a full list of the over 3000 tools for formal and informal learning divided into 25 main categories, click here

Cool Tools for Library 2.0
These are short podcasts of Web 2.0 tools and their uses in educational settings. These Podcasts are produced and presented by graduate students in the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University.
Here’s a linked list of the tools reviewed:

• 30Boxes - an online calendar application with built-in social networking features.
  
• 43Things - This tool helps people organize life lists and goals.
  
• Animoto - a web-based service for creating a music video from your pictures
  
• Bloglines - a free web-based service that collects and aggregates a user's online subscriptions.
  
• BookGlutton - a free social networking tool that revolves around reading
  
• Brainify - a social bookmarking tool intended for students and faculty at colleges and universities for bookmarking web sites relevant to college courses and academic subject areas .
  
• Del.icio.us - a social bookmarking tool that allows users to bookmark interesting links for later use and to share with friends.
  
• Digg - a social networking website where users can discover and share content - news stories, blog posts, web links, photos, and videos - from anywhere on the Internet.
  
• Dimdim - a free web conferencing tool
  
• Evernote - a note saving tool that functions on the web, on your desktop, or on your mobile phone.
  
• Feed 43 - a free, web-based tool for converting web pages to RSS feeds or customizing existing RSS feeds
  
• Flickr - an online photo management and sharing application that allows you to organize your photos into sets and collections, to tag them, and to share them with friends and family.
  
• Flock a free, open source, "next generation" Web browser that aims to integrate a wide variety of Web 2.0 applications directly into a browser.
  
• Gliffy - a diagramming tool
  
• Goodreads – a social network for readers
  
• Google Calendar - a free time-management tool available to anyone with a Google account.
  
• Google Docs - an application that allows you to create documents (text, spreadsheets, or presentations) on a shared server location and then collaborate with others to edit them in real time."
  
• Google Sites – created for online team collaboration and allows for easy attachment and incorporation of documents, calendars, videos, and gadgets.
  
• GoogleBooks - offers users the opportunity to view and search the full content of books."
  
• iMacros - a record and playback tool for your browser.
  
• LibraryThing - a social website revolving around books that allows users to create online catalogs of their personal libraries, tagging and rating their books and making them available for others to view .
  
• Meebo - a free, web-based, instant messenger agreegator for all your IM buddy lists Picasa – a tool to organize, edit, and share your photos."
  
• Rollyo - a web tool that allows you to create your own custom search engine to add to your browser, webpage, or blog
  
• Slideshare – a community for sharing presentations.
  
• Splashup - a web application that performs basic editing of images through your web browser and even connects to a few of the more popular online communities to download, edit and post photos.
  
• Survey Monkey – enables users to easily create and customize professional looking online surveys and publish them online."
  
• Tag Galaxy - a mashup that searches and sorts the tagged images in Flickr and displays them on a multi-picture sphere."
  
• Talkshoe - allows anyone to easily create, join, or listen to live "TalkCasts," which can be interactive discussions, talkshows, conversations, podcasts or audioblogs.
  
• Technorati – tool for tracking and indexing blogs.
  
• Tumblr - a form of tumblelog which has come to mean a blog that is populated with many pictures, URL’s, videos etc.
  
• Voice Thread - an application that allows users to create interactive slide shows.
  
• Voki - a social Web site where you can create your own personalized animated avatars."
  
• Zotero - a Firefox add-on that allows you to collect and organize research material from within your web browser and cancan automatically extract bibliographic data from online catalogs, journal articles, and more.

Blogging Tools

• Blogger – Google’s free blog publishing tool.
  
• TypePad – A popular blog platform that makes blogging simple. The service is no longer free.
  
• WordPress.com – A free hosted blogging service that allows you to start a blog without any technical knowledge.

Blog Search Engines

• Bloglines - A free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content.
  
• BlogScope – An analysis and visualization tool for blogosphere that can assist the user in discovering interesting information from millions of blogs via a set of numerous unique features including popularity curves, identification of information bursts, related terms, and geographical search.
  
• Google Blog Search - A blog-only search service by Google.
  
• Technorati – One of the first and largest blog search engines that help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation. As of 2009, Technorati indexes 1.5 million new blog posts in real time.

A page on the wiki Classroom 2.0 that provides an overview of the concept of instant messaging (IM), its uses in education, and links to IM services.

Meebo – Can use one service to IM and chat with people on every major IM network in a single buddylist.

Voice and Chat

• Google Talk - A downloadable application for Windows that offers free PC-to-PC voice chat
  
• Skype – Free voice and video calls over the internet that operates on PCs and Macs
• iChat (Apple)

Twitter in Plain English
Commoncraft
Release date: March 5, 2008 : length 2:23
Description: A short video that explains twitter and microblogging. Commoncraft also has a video on Twitter Search In Plain English.

Tumblr – Allows you to share text, photos, links, music and videos from your browser, phone, or email.

bubbl.us – A free web-based brainstorming application that lets you create and share colorful mind maps.

Podcasting in Plain English
Commoncraft
Release Date: 4/21/2008 : length 3:00.
Description: An introduction to podcasting in Commoncraft’s short and minimalistic animation video style.

Tools for Making Audio Podcasts

• Audacity - A free and open source software for recording and editing sounds that is popular with academic podcasters
  
• Gabcast – This service allow you to make podcasts by calling in through your phone and then posting them to your blog or website and then a newsfeed is sent to alert subscribers to the new content. This service is no longer free.

Locations for Finding, Downloading and Listening to Podcasts

• iTunes U – "iTunes U is a part of the iTunes Store featuring free lectures, language lessons, audiobooks, and more, that you can enjoy on your iPod, iPhone, Mac or PC. Explore over 100,000 educational audio and video files from top universities, museums and public media organizations from around the world."
  • Tunes U audio and video Podcasts are only accessible to listen to and download through the iTunes Store. You must have the iTunes digital media player installed on your computer access these audio/video programs. To download the player for free, click here. To learn more about iTunes U, click here.
  • There are no unique URLs for iTunes U podcasts. Therefore, to locate the podcast you will need to do a search within iTunes. A suggested search string (text used for searching) is provided for each iTunes U podcast.
• Odeo - Odeo is a website where you can find millions of MP3s and podcasts, which you can download and play from the siteor embed them on your blog and website (using a piece of code). You can also subscribe to your Odeo playlist with iTunes or RSS.

How to Record, Edit, and Promote a Podcast
techsoup.org

This is written for nonprofit organizations, but the information is helpful to anyone--including educators--seeking to create their own podcasts.

RSS Overview
Classroom 2.0
Description: A page on the wiki Classroom 2.0 that begins with a short video from Commoncraft on "RSS in Plain English" and then presents uses of RSS in education, lesson plans, and links to RSS Feeds and Readers.

Selective list of RSS readers – NOTE: Many of the newer browsers have RSS capability built in.

• Blogbridge – A free RSS reader that integrates well with delicious (social bookmarking) to help you manage news and collection information.
  
• Bloglines – A free web-based RSS reader and aggregator.
  
• Google Reader – A free web-based reader to aggregate and read all of your news abd blog feeds.

Easy Ways to Publish Your Own RSS Feeds
techsoup.org

Social Bookmarking
Description: A page on the wiki Classroom 2.0 that provides an overview of the concept of social bookmarking, its uses in education, lesson plans, and links to social bookmarking tools.

Selective list of social bookmarking tools

• Delicious – Allows an online user to keep and share online bookmarks using tags.
  
• Diigo – An onlne annotation tool that allows you to highlight, write notes, and share web pages.
  
• CiteULike – A service for managing and discovering scholarly resources online.
  
• Zotero – A Firefox extension that aids in collecting, managing and citing research sources found online.

Social Networking in Plain English
Commoncraft
Release Date: 6/27/2007 : length 1:53.
Official Description: A short introduction to the concept of social networking

Selective List of Social Networking Sites

• Facebook – A free social networking web site that was originally developed for college students to keep in touch but is now the most used social network worldwide.
  
• Ning – A free online platform for people to create their own social networks. Very popular in the k-12 education community. There is a Ning community on web 2.0 tools for education called Classroom 2.0

Google Video– Google Video is an index of videos available for viewing on the web from personal videos to TV shows, movie clips, music videos, and documentaries.

YouTube – A subsidiary of Google is a a video sharing website where users can upload and share videos.

Wikis in Plain English
Commoncraft
Release Date: 5/29/2007 : length 3:34.
Official Description: "A short introduction to wikis that illustrates how they can be used to organize a group's information, in this case, for a camping trip."

Wikiality - This segment from a July 30, 2006 "Colbert Report" from Comedy Central Comedy Central’s "Colbert Report"
Released: July 30, 2006 | length 4:10
Description – This video clip humorously exploits the credibility concerns regarding information posted on the massive online wiki encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Selective List of Wiki Applications

• Google Docs – A free, web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and form application by Google that allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users.
  
• PBwiki – Free and easy to use wikis for the educational community.
  How to create your own PBwiki in 5 minutes
  Frequently asked questions on how to use PBwiki
  
• Vyew – Online collaboration and web conferencing service that is browser based and includes a rich set of tools that enable collaborators to work together on presentations, documents, audio/video, images, screen captures, desktop shares, and whiteboard annotations.
  
• Wikispaces – Their motto is "Wikis for everyone." A popular free wiki service in the educational community.

Blackboard Blogs
Blackboard.com
> Blackboard Higher Ed Blog

Selected Blackboard tutorials from Blackboard.com

• Orientation to the Course Environment
• How to - Course Content / Add Content
• How to - Add Tools / Make Tools Available
• How to - Create Blogs
• How to Create Groups / Add Students
• How to Add a Column in the Grade Center

Blackboard TV on You Tube

Blackboard 9 - Embedding You Tube Video
You Tube video, 2:09 min.

Blackboard 9 - Editing Group Sets
You Tube video, 2:21 min.

Blackboard How To Videos From SUNY New Paltz:

• Embed a YouTube video
• Create an eJournal
• Student use of eJournal with Faculty Comment
• Create a link for students to submit assignments
• Student Submitting an Assignment
• Retrieving a Submitted Assignment
• Retrieving ALL Files Submitted for an Assignment
• Anti-Plagiarism Using SafeAssign