Thing 22

WOW! Can you believe it?  The last Thing!

For this Thing, I decided to explore and teach myself some of the other Web 2.0 applications that are out there.  The first one I stumbled upon was extremely easy to use.  It's called Upcoming and you basically choose the date on the sidebar, type in your zip code or types of events you are searching for (musical, sport, etc) and it will create a list of events happening in your area.  You can sort the list based on the date, most popular, relevance, or recently added.  Lectures on health topics, Wild Safaris at the Zoo, upcoming exhibits at local museums, Red Cross Blood Drives, and comedians performing at Comedy clubs are all events that will show up - then you can add them to your personal calendar!  So next time you have company coming into town, this is a super easy tool to use to find out what kind of events to check out!

Writeboard is the second Web 2.0 application that I find intriguing.  Supposedly it's a whiteboard document that you can share with others - everyone adding their own comments and edits, but it will keep a running log of each person's draft so nothing is lost.  Here is a screenshot:

I created my own whiteboard, and edited it three times.  On the right hand side, you can see which version I am viewing and how many edits there have been.  Another neat feature is the compare button.  You can choose two different versions and click compare to see what was changed, making it easy to see each person's contributions.

The font highlighted in green has been added in this newest version while the gray crossed out font is the text from the first draft.  The editing features available leave something to be desired, but it sure is a quick and easy way to collaborate on documents together with colleagues.  I can see this tool being useful for team meeting notes, agendas, collaboration on an upcoming school event in which you need to help co-plan, peer editing work (students), planning for advisory, feedback for emails being sent out, and possibly editing each other comments for report cards (although it MAY  be a pain to have all these documents floating around...).

The last Thing I wanted to share are these creative web 2.0 games that I find addicting and so different from some of the tools we've explored so far.  You can find them here on the Cooltoolsforschools site.  

Questionaut is a fun 8 level game where you need to retrieve your friend's hat by answering questions.  The degree of difficulty is good for 5th to 6th graders.  The best (and maybe the most frustrating) is that at each level, you need to do certain things in order to get the questions.  You have no idea what you're doing and you learn by trial and error.  Such a good lesson for kids these days.  The answer is not immediately given to you!  I had a lot of fun playing it.  LOTS of good tools and applications on this site.