The term "Web 2.0" first appeared in January 1999, used by an information architecture consultant, Darcy DiNucci, to describe a change in the previous concept of "web 1.0". In the following years, its usage gained popularity, and nowadays, most people know the basic concept behind it (or at least it rings a bell).
There is not a clear-cut definition that was agreed on the field, but as a broad definition, Tim O'Reilly (2005) said in his article "What Is Web 2.0", that Web 2.0 is "(...) a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core." This encompasses a plethora of resources at the users' disposal that make their experience even more rich.
If we apply this concept to education, it allows a more collaborative process. The endless tools and devises available in this Web enables a multi-dimensional teaching, especially in the EFL classroom.
For example, we can mention two tools that can be very helpful to our lessons, adding an extra flavor to our students’ interests.
First, we have “word clouds”, also known as “tag clouds”, which is a typical phenomenon that appeared with Web 2.0. A “word cloud” is a visual representation of text data. It can be used in a wide variety of ways, such us free form text, hyperlinks, etc. In our lessons, we can use it as a pre-reading activity so students can hypothesis about the text. It can also help students to review a writing task since “word clouds” can show you the prominence of the most used words.
For instance, we can take a sentence related to Web 2.0 and make a word cloud so students can reconstruct the correct order of word.
There is not a clear-cut definition that was agreed on the field, but as a broad definition, Tim O'Reilly (2005) said in his article "What Is Web 2.0", that Web 2.0 is "(...) a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core." This encompasses a plethora of resources at the users' disposal that make their experience even more rich.
If we apply this concept to education, it allows a more collaborative process. The endless tools and devises available in this Web enables a multi-dimensional teaching, especially in the EFL classroom.
For example, we can mention two tools that can be very helpful to our lessons, adding an extra flavor to our students’ interests.
First, we have “word clouds”, also known as “tag clouds”, which is a typical phenomenon that appeared with Web 2.0. A “word cloud” is a visual representation of text data. It can be used in a wide variety of ways, such us free form text, hyperlinks, etc. In our lessons, we can use it as a pre-reading activity so students can hypothesis about the text. It can also help students to review a writing task since “word clouds” can show you the prominence of the most used words.
For instance, we can take a sentence related to Web 2.0 and make a word cloud so students can reconstruct the correct order of word.
Another tool that can be helpful in our EFL lessons is “Text to speech” (TTS). There are many TTS tools available but we are going to talk about Voki. With Voki we can create an avatar that can verbalize the phrase or text that we want. We can use this tool to make a presentation, to create a message (since once the Voki is done you can send it by e-mail or post it in any platform), or to practice isolated phrases or words.
As an example, we can reconstruct the word cloud above with this Voki.
As we have said, the Web 2.0 offers us limitless possibilities to improve our teaching and to make it more interesting.
We encourage you to try these tools that we presented in this post and to dive in the depths of the available options that we can find in the world wide web.
If you have any other interesting tool, leave a comment!
Sources:
Tim O'Reilly (2005) "What Is Web 2.0"
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