Organize your Powerpoints online.

Powerpoint. If you are anything like me, you might have some strong and mixed opinions about Powerpoint. I mean, why do people put so much text on their slides. If they are giving me a presentation, then give a presentation. Don't read your note cards to me. And what is with all of those crazy animations. Any teacher that has used Powerpoint with students, knows just how distracting all the bells and whistles of Powerpoint can be. I could go on and on, but I won't because that is not the purpose of this post.

The point is, I use Powerpoint with my classes despite my love-hate relationship with the misunderstood Microsoft application. I also like to have a way for my students to access my slideshows after class. There are many reasons for wanting to do this, and no matter what yours may be, there is a great Web 2.0 resource that makes sharing presentation files easy.

Slideshare is an online community where members are able to upload slideshows and save them to a free account. You can also search presentations from other users. Once you have uploaded your presentations, you can control privacy settings and download permissions for viewers. You can give students a link to your Slideshare account and they will have access to all of your presentations. My school's website allows teachers to post documents for students to download, but I find Slideshare much easier for students because they do not need to download anything. Students are able to watch the presentations right on the Slideshare website, making it easy for them to switch from one slideshow to another. If you have a blog or website for your students, Slideshare will allow you embed a presentation pack right into your site or blog. Like this...

| Get your Presentation Pack

You are also able to tag your slideshows with descriptors so that you can create separate presentation packs with different slideshows for different classes.   Any presentation pack that you have will automatically update when you upload new slideshows to your Slideshare account.

If you use Powerpoint, defintely check out slideshare, or this sample account.   It's FREE!

Webinar on Classroom 2.0

Ok, one more push for Classroom 2.0. On February 26 from 8pm to 9pm Classroom 2.0 will hold a webinar entitled "Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives" with speaker John Palfrey, author of "Born Digital".

So what is a webinar? Basically it is a professional development seminar that you can attend in your pajamas. The only thing you need to do is join Classroom 2.0 and then at the time of the webinar, log on to Classroom 2.0 and follow the webinar link.

Classroom 2.0

Join Classroom 2.0, I beg you! Classroom 2.0 is a social networking website for teachers looking to share ideas and get help on integrating technology into the classroom. It is free to join. Once you sign up, you can read and participate in online discussion forums. The conversations are great and there are a lot of members, so consequently a lot of feedback and ideas.

This is a great first step to figuring out how to incorporate some technology into your teaching. You might learn a classroom use for a technology you already use personally, or learn about an entirely new web application that you never knew existed. Maybe you've been trying to find an application that does something special and can't find anything like what you've been imaging. You might be able to find it at Classroom 2.0. Happy Networking!

Welcome!

Welcome to Teacher Web Tools! This blog is going to explore classroom uses for Web 2.0 technology, and there are some great resources out there. Let's start with Delicious, since I have other Web 2.0 applications saved in my Delicious account for you.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site. You can create a free account, and then start saving bookmarks. The great thing about Delicious, is that since your bookmarks are stored online, you can access them from any computer. You have the ability to make your bookmarks public or private, and you can even search other users' public bookmarks!

So how do I use Delicious in teaching? Well, I went through and saved some Web 2.0 resources to my Delicious account to share with you. I tagged them all with the descriptor Web2.0.They are public and all in one place for your reference.

You could use Delicious in a similar way with your students. If you want students to research a topic online, you can preselect the websites that you want them to use. Simply save all the websites to Delicious with the same tag and give the link to your students. You could even do this to generate a list of resources for your students to use for extra help or studying purposes.