Web 2.0 Workshop with Tom Daccord -- Day 2

Today began as a continuation of work-time on our blogs.

Next we explored website creation and updating. The tool Tom chose to show us and have us use was Google Page Creator. We got acquainted with the Site Manager and the Page Creator interface. Formatting pages, adding pages, and otherwise assembling a website using Page Creator is quite easy. With tools like Google Page Creator, deciding to do an assignment or project where students would each create their own website could hardly be easier. Obviously, long-gone are the days when, if you wanted to design and get online a website of your own, you’d have to spend major dollars on programs like Dreamweaver. Google Page Creator is free (you do have to create a Google Account but that’s free, too) and design templates make page creation easy. Dreamweaver still does the fancy stuff but it’s quite likely that something like Page Creator will be quite sufficient for student assignments. After all, our focus is going to be on the content more than the design anyway. It was very useful getting a chance to have our own experience using this tool.

It may unnecessary to bring this up again but all the Web 2.0 tools we’ve been using so far are free, their user interface is generally straight-forward, functional, and easy to use. Most offer WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) formatting. and have social networking and collaborative tools built in.

RSS and RSS aggregators were a topic that came up again. Tom featured Bloglines and Google Reader and showed how to add feeds to both. I pointed out to the group that Outlook 2007 has built-in capability to subscribe to RSS feeds. They are accessible in the Outlook Folder List. It’s very handy.

Our next type of tool we looked at is referred to as a mash-up. Tom showed us PageFlakes and how to add news, widgets/gadgets, calendars, and other content to a PageFlake page. All a mash-up is is a web page that displays content chosen by the user. With a mash-up you are able to see, at a glance, news headlines, weather summaries, and an array of up-to-the-minute content in short, headline form. This makes it easy to skip the material of little or no interest and to click on the content where you want to see the full story. Another workshop participant and I pointed out that iGoogle is also a mash-up. Since many of us are using a number of Google tools (Gmail, Blogger, Google Page Creator, Google Docs, etc.), we thought people might consider exploring iGoogle, too, in addition to PageFlakes.

We next took a dip into podcasting. Tom seems to be a strong advocate of podcasting and showed us the ease of creating one – on the fly! – in our workshop. He recorded our responses to a question he posed, passing around his cellphone. He uploaded it to a service called Gcast and, within minutes, we were listening to it as a podcast on Gcast and/or iTunes. That whole process was indeed pretty amazing and Tom made it look super easy. He said that he has used such a cellphone podcast in his history classes for a quick discussion topic or an impromptu quiz.

This was another stimulating and productive day.