Thunder

The following is taken from the wikispaces website:

Back in January, we decided to offer our Plus Plan to K-12 teachers for free. We didn’t set out with a grand strategy, just an interest in helping teachers with our easy to use wiki technology.

Over 10,000 educational wikis later, we’ve heard countless stories of excited students and empowered teachers. They’ve told us about their collaborative essays, group study guides, online lesson plans, and classroom notice boards coming alive on Wikispaces.

Now we’re taking the next step - we want to give away 100,000 free K-12 Plus wikis. That includes all the features and benefits that normally cost $50/year - for free. No fine print, no usage limits, no advertising, no catches.

We hope that you’ll read on, try a wiki at your school, and help us spread the word.

Following the two comments on my posting about web2.0 technologies I thought it would be worth explaining why I included Technorati.

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At the end of November I am giving a keynote in Derbyshire on ‘using web2.0 in the classroom’, it is a 45minute slot and I have decided that I will not be using powerpoint or keynote, I will run the presentation from either this blog or from my del.icio.us account. Given that I have 45minutes I thought I would spend 5 minutes looking at 8 different technologies, so my first question is which 8.

At present this is my list:

1 - Blogs
2 - RSS feeds and aggregators, including NewsGator and Bloglines
3 - Del.icio.us
4 - Wikis, inlcuding Google Docs and Wikispaces
5 - Flickr
6 - Technorati
7 - Podcasts
8 - Skype

I know they are not all web2.0 technologies, I guess I am moving towards social and collaborative technologies in general. Anyone have any thoughts on this list, anything you think should be included and if so what gets the boot?

When I logged into my Writely account today I was surprised to see that it has now been combined with Google Spreadsheets to be called ‘Google Docs & Spreadsheets‘.  So what does this mean for Writely?

• It is now easier to access both your spreadsheets and your documents
• Collaborators can now invite new collaborators
• You can invite people to just view but not edit
• The layout of the actual toolbars etc has changed, it seems a little less clunky now.

So what do you think, is Google Docs and improvement on Writely?

Following the success of the wiki listing educational blogs in Scotland an English equivalent has now been created.  If you have an educational blog in England or Scotland please add a link on the respetive wiki, maybe a Welsh wiki needs to be created.

One of the many discussions from the recent Teachmeet in Glasgow was the topic of filtering.  Many of the web2.0 applications that we were talking about are being blocked by isp’s or LA, what can we do to get around this?  In Shropshire I have to email our corporate IT team, who are in charge of our broadband connectivity, and ask them to get our ISP to unblock it.  Most web2.0 technologies appear to be blocked, but the reasons they blocked are very bizarre, I noticed last week that Google Spreadsheets was blocked - the category it was blocked under was ‘chat’, I suppose I could use this real time collaborative spreadsheet as a chat room, but could I really be bothered?  I think most technologies they don’t understand they just block and class it as chat.  Tedtalks was also blocked as it has ‘talks’ in its url, I don’t think they check the websites when they block them if they did I don’t think they would have blocked it.
I mentioned that Becta had an article about Flickr that I used to persuade IT services to unblock Flickr, you can view it here.

Following from Teachmeet, Theo has created a wiki for sharing ideas about the educational implications of using online video editing applications.  So if you feel like joining the debate pop along and sign up.

Last month I posted that Writely had opened up for new registrants but unfortunately that was not the case, but I can now tell you that it is open for new registrants so pop over and sign up for an account you will not regret it.

My earlier post can be found here.

Time have just released their 50 coolest websites, I really liked several on the list including ‘The Human Clock‘ and old favourites Digg, YouTube and Google Spreadsheets.

How do we select our finalists? We evaluate hundreds of candidates—some suggested by readers, colleagues and friends, others discovered during countless hours of surfing. Many of this year’s choices are shining examples of Web 2.0: next-generation sites offering dynamic new ways to inform and entertain, sites with cutting-edge tools to create, consume, share or discuss all manners of media, from blog posts to video clips.

I also found on the page a link to ‘25 Sites We Can’t Live Without‘ - this list includes so many websites that I use on a weekly basis.

Can you think of any sites that they have missed off the list, apart from this blog of course

I have just found the Bikely website, put very simply, Bikely helps cyclists share knowledge of good bicycle routes.  At present the site is very young therefore there is not complete coverage, but I can see this site growing rapidly.

As a user you can either submit a route or search for a route.  Once you have found a route you are interested in, Bikely uses Google Maps to display the route.  Those posting routes can include waypoints and/or further information, for example details about places to eat or drink.  The routes can be downloaded as a gpx file for use with your gps device.
So if you are off on holiday or just fancy getting out on your bike give the site a try, when I get some time I will post a couple of routes I have riden along in Shropshire.