This week, I learned how to use a bunch of different free web tools that will be very useful in the classroom. First, I learned how to create a wiki through pbworks.com and how to create various pages within the wiki. We also learned how to embed various things such as googledocs, calendars, maps, and pictures into our wiki pages. To edit the pictures in our wiki, I learned how to use picnik, which provides a lot of free editing capabilities. In order to communicate with others synchronously, I learned how to use Google Video Chat.
For me, the most difficult thing to learn was how to use the html within the wiki in order to embed things onto the site. HTML is still pretty confusing to me, but I learned how to change the size of the thing I want to embed as well as adding an iframe into the site. But at the same time, I think that the wiki will be the most useful tool to learn because you can have an entire course website up for your class that can include a calendar, assignments, and documents that update when you update them on your personal computer. I also think video chatting will be useful if you have a guest speaker that is too far away to travel to your school. The class will still have the opportunity to hear them and learn from them. I think that is the main idea of these web tools-- being able to open up the possibilities for learning and making things easier to access.
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