More Cool Web 2.0 Tools

After reading Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for the Classrooms by Will Richardson and perusing through the various links listed for me in the Web 2.0 Tools for the Classroom by my professor, Mary Bennett, from Fresno Pacific University, both waxed eloquently of all the web tools we have at our availability in our classrooms. This reminded me of something I saw at an NJAET (New Jersey Association for Educational Technology) conference two years ago and to which I keep returning. It is a web tool that I could use easily with a jigsaw method of teaching whereby the students each take sections of material and share them so they are responsible for teaching each other. Using the jigsaw method makes the students accountable but a great way to share it would be with Fakebook. Students are familiar with the popular social networking site, Facebook, and Fakebook, which is strictly educational, allows the teacher to set up a topic and the students can contribute by networking with each other much the same as creating Facebook profiles. For example, each student could add their authors and book titles for our annual fifth grade Battle of the Books which is a district wide competition. They could use the Fakebook pages they made to for an author/book study to practice for the competition. The only limitation Fakebook has is that they do clear out the information from time to time but if you save the URL, you can always get your information back. I plan on running it by a fifth grade teacher to see what she thinks of this. Being the Technical Coordinator in the building, I thought it might be easy to set this up during one of their regular class periods and could be finished at home or during extra lab times. That way I can reach over 140 students at once. It could be a great resource.