Web 2.0 technology just refers to online tools that enable students and teachers to share and collaborate user-generated content with others. Using Web 2.0 technologies effectively in the classroom promotes learning through a social constructivist model.

I provide here a list of my top 10 Web 2.0 applications, which can facilitate teaching and learning across the curriculum:

Add Subtitles – Ssemble is an easy-to-use online video editor. And it has a AI-powered Subtitle Generating feature, giving users the advantage of auto-generating subtitles and customizing their style to best fit their content.

Animoto – this tool helps you to create professional looking slide shows.  All you need to do is attach some photos and add background music.

Bubbl.us – enables the user to create mind-maps that can then be embedded online.

Classtools – specifically one for teachers, this website provides you with templates, countdown timers and other tools that can be used in class.  The random name generator enables you to enter the names of your class, click the fruit machine and it will randomly scroll through and select a name from the list.

FlexClip – a simple but powerful web-based video maker that helps you create videos for any purpose.  There is no download, or registration required.  You can choose from a wide range of pre-made video templates, photos, and music.  I especially appreciate the clean storyboard that allows you to easily trim video, insert text  add music and record the screen with just a few clicks.

Motionbox – this is a free online video creation tool that allows people to easily create beautiful videos with a single click, Add Subtitles, Trim Audio, Crop Video, YouTube to MP3 and Resize Gifs.

News on Atlas – this has been one of my ongoing projects.  By providing multiple news feeds, which are embedded into an atlas template, the purpose of News on Atlas is to help build students’ news literacy skills and international awareness.

Padlet – this is like a giant noticeboard and allows learners to write a short message on the ‘wall’ for others to see.  These messages can then be moved around just like Post-it notes, and just like Google Docs, learners can collaborate on the same project together.

Prezi – this tool creates animated presentations and can help both the teacher and learner to focus on the key points.

Screencast-o-matic – I use this regularly to create online tutorials.  This tool lets you record anything on your screen.  It also lets you upload PowerPoints, so that you can provide audio narration.

TedEd – there are thousands of lessons that you can customise with your own questions and resources on TedEd.  You can use videos from YouTube and then use TedEd to add your own written material.  This is one way of doing a flipped classroom.

Wordle – allows users to enter huge chunks of text, which is then summarised by the most popular word.

Voki – this tool enables you to create talking avatars (characters).  Everything about the avatar that you create can then be edited.  You can attach spoken text for your avatar or record your own voice.  Either way, this is a great tool for helping with language development.

The list here is not exhaustive, as there are literally hundreds of fantastic Web 2.0 apps out there.  In order to meet statutory requirements though, and to allow students to develop their ICT skills more extensively, the Computing curriculum should be integrated throughout the school, not just discretely (in the ICT lab).  Making use of Web 2.0 apps can be an effective way of doing this because it means that we are teaching children more aspects of ICT, and this puts them in good stead to function well in our increasingly connected and digitalised world.

My vision for News on Atlas is and has always been to provide a tool to improve the news literacy and international-mindedness of users.  I think it’s worth exploring other initiatives that have had similiar aims in order to highlight the potential usefulness of News on Atlas.  Having researched this area a lot, I have found two prominent examples in recent years of efforts to integrate such lessons into the classroom, The Powerful Voices for Kids Program and the News Literacy Program at Stony Brook University.  I discuss these examples here:

1. The Powerful Voices for Kids Program – Hobbs (2010)

Powerful Voices for Kids participated in a university-school partnership involving Temple University students working with small groups of children (ages 9 to 11) to develop their news literacy skills during July 2010.  The young age of the participants made this program particularly unique.  According to Powers (2010, pp. 2) targeting students still in compulsory education is wise, because these are the years when many people begin developing reading and viewing routines.  The younger news literacy can be taught the better.  Hobbs (2010) observed this program closely, reporting it to be a perfect example of “what works” in news literacy education, and she uses this to draw fundamental learning principles that should guide the pedagogy of news literacy.

Hobbs focuses specifically on one group of children who were involved in a project where they explored just one news story in depth: the violence associated with flash mobs in Philadelphia.  Using the simple programming tool, Scratch, the children made interactive media about the news event, which stimulated conversation about how the news is constructed and why news is important in society.  Hobbs (2010) reveals key learning outcomes of this project for the children, which made them more aware of the role of news in society, how to assess its reliability and the impact news can have on others.

Commenting on the outcomes of the program, McManus (2009) states that:

‘In my view, these are the kinds of insights that are now essential for people to be full participants in contemporary society.  These are habits of mind that will enable young people to flourish in the tsunami of information that surrounds them, where news pretenders offer “fake news” and where cheapening and corner-cutting interfere in cash-strapped news organisations leads to a diminution of quality news and information’. 

According to Hobbs (pp. 4), the success of the program was achieved by building critical thinking and communication skills.  In contrast to the transmission model of education, the program begins from the learner’s interests: ‘Learners, not teachers select the topic to examine, and they select news that’s personally meaningful to them’.  In the teaching process, students are also encouraged to ask critical questions, using reasoning and evidence to support their ideas.  This method is particularly appropriate for the area that Hobbs refers to as ‘constructedness’, in which careful attention is paid to how news stories are constructed.

2. News Literacy Program at Stony Brook University – Fleming (2013)

Fleming (2013) provides a case study that focuses on one of the most ambitious and well-funded curricular news literacy programs.  Ideologically, the News Literacy Program at Stony Brook is similar to the Powerful Voices for Kids Program, but it is an ongoing program that exclusively involves university students.  Fleming describes it as an experiment in modern journalism education.  This is because traditionally, journalism has had a practice-oriented philosophy, and yet as Fleming (pp. 2) explains, Stony Brook’s program ‘veered off of journalism education’s skills-development tradition and into unchartered territory called news literacy’.  Howard Schneider, the founding dean of the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University, designed the program with the objective that young audiences would sharpen their critical thinking skills and come to support high-quality news.  According to Fleming (2013, pp. 11), Schneider feared that important news literacy principles of the press were disappearing as the lines of “responsible” journalism and ‘everything else blurred in the fast-moving digital sea of information and disinformation’.

The approach at Stony Brook is in line with suggestions made by Mihailidis that news literacy programs should not just focus on critiquing news content but should also focus on understanding and contextualising it.  According to Fleming (2013, pp. 13), this translates into an instructional strategy that teaches students how to access, evaluate, analyse, and appreciate journalism.  As with the Powerful Voices for Kids Program, the success of news literacy education is largely derived from creating what Hobbs (1998, pp. 28) calls a ‘pedagogy of inquiry’, “asking critical questions about what you watch, see, and read”.  The ultimate objective is to promote critical thinking skills which develop intellectual autonomy on the part of the student.  The broader goal of critical thinking, according to Mihailidis (2011, pp. 4), guards against taking the mediated environment for granted.  After all, as McLuhan (1969, pp. 5) pointed out, humans live in constructed media environments as unconsciously as fish live in water.

News literacy education must therefore help students understand and analyse the constructions of reality presented by journalists, which sometimes offer incomplete or inaccurate portrayals of the world we live in.  This would explain the overall objectives of both the Powerful Voices for Kids Program and the news literacy course at Stony Brook, which is for students to become more consistent and sceptical news consumers, who are able to accurately assess the reliability of news.  Fleming (2013, pp. 13) presents results that instructional approaches based on this approach to news literacy, include high levels of engagement, a greater awareness of current events, and deeper, more nuanced understandings of journalism.

Moreover, as alluded to by Mihailidis (2011, pp. 28), the goal of news literacy should not simply be to generate distrust or cynicism about the news, because otherwise, news literacy programs might lead to dismissive attitudes about the press and civic responsibilities in general.  In one of his studies for example, Mihailidis (pp. 30) finds that a class focused on news was successful in developing critical reading and viewing skills, but it also seemed to encourage cynical views of the press.  A balance needs to be struck, therefore, between teaching critical thinking skills and at the same time fostering appropriate interpretative habits about the news.  It is this approach that seems to be exemplified by both the Powerful Voices for Kids Program and the Stony Brook news literacy program, which equips students to demand and appreciate quality journalism that adheres to the norms to which it aspires.

Concluding thoughts…

Aside from their effective pedagogies, the success of these two programs can be attributed to the ready availability of appropriate technologies and access to diverse news sources.  These two factors facilitate the fundamental objectives of news literacy but unfortunately also represent the key challenges in the programs’ replication.  Fleming (2013, pp. 14) for example, states that ‘the Stony Brook approach is not without fault because of its cost, dependence on PowerPoint presentations, and last minute updates’.  Similarly, the Powerful Voices for Kids Program relies on the distribution of age-appropriate news articles, coding software (Scratch), and the support of university students.  Discussing information obesity, Whitworth (2009, pp. 2) states that:

‘At the very least, we will suffer a loss in quality of engagement, and require new tools and strategies to deal with the overload’.

This same statement could apply equally well to the challenges facing news consumers.  Both the Powerful Voices for Kids and Stony Brook Program have appropriate strategies in place to deal with the large quantity of news online, helping students to navigate and analyse this information.  However, the replication of these strategies is limited because the tools provided on the programs themselves are costly in terms of time to prepare, organise and use.  News on Atlas has been designed to reduce these costs and enable more schools to replicate the pedagogy underlying successful news literacy programmes.

References

Fleming, J.  2013.  Media Literacy, News Literacy, or News Appreciation? A Case Study of the News Literacy Program at Stony Brook University.  Journalism & Mass Communication Educator.

Hobbs, R.  2010.  News Literacy: What Works and What Doesn’t.  University of Rhode Island.

McCluhan, M and Parker, H.  1969.  Counterblast.

Mihailidis, P.  2011.  News Literacy.  Global Perspectives for the Newsroom and Classroom.

Whitworth, A.  2009.  Information Obesity.  Chandos, Oxford, UK.

The global news landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. News readership has increasingly shifted to the Internet because of inexpensive technology, ubiquitous access and free content. This has led to a trend of information democratisation in which information control has shifted from a few powerful entities toward smaller outlets and individual citizens. User-generated news sources like blogs, wiki pages and YouTube videos are now commonplace. As a result, according to the Pew Research Center (2012), the audience for news on the Internet has grown from nothing in 1993 to second behind only television.

Although the Internet brings users more news, there is consequently more uncertainty about whether news sources – both traditional and otherwise – are providing relevant or even credible information. Powers (2010, pp. 5), for example, states that young people in particular, report being overwhelmed by the amount of news sources and content available online. This makes it increasingly important for news consumers to develop digital literacy skills that allow them to weigh the value of what they read, see, and hear.

News literacy, a fundamental yet too often unrecognised area of digital literacy, helps students to foster a more intellectually rigorous relationship with news media. News literacy is neatly defined by Schwarz (2011, pp. 1) as ‘the reader’s ability to critically evaluate, interpret and process as well as participate in news media’. As we live in an increasingly interconnected and globalised world, I would argue that the word “global” should also be used when discussing news literacy; much of the news content viewed online is from international journalism networks, which create what Reese (2012) refers to as a “global news arena”. Reese explains that bringing a global perspective to news literacy requires a basic awareness of how national contexts differ; it means taking concrete local circumstances into account while being aware of how they differ from other areas and how global forces bring “influence from a distance”.

Global news is a highly complex, albeit important subject. In my context of working as teacher in a bi-lingual British school in El Salvador, I have seen the importance of this subject manifest in the overall objectives of the International Primary Curriculum (IPC) and International Baccalaureate (IB). These programmes correctly consider themselves to be leading proponents of international education and are designed to promote international mindedness (Stagg, 2013). Students on the IB for example, are required to keep up-to-date with current national and international news events relevant to their areas of study. Moreover, one of the traits and values of the school is “international mindedness”, encouraging students to develop a cosmopolitan attitude and willingness to learn about life in other parts of the world. All of this forms part of the Council of International Schools (CIS) accreditation process, which asks schools to ‘demonstrate a commitment to internationalism in education’ (CIS, 2013).

Unfortunately, despite the buzz words in the curriculum and the rhetoric of schools, little is actually done to facilitate learning about the world in which we live. Specifically, the most relevant sources for informing students (and their teachers) about social, economic and political events happening around the world – global news media – are widely absent from the classroom. This seems to be the case in educational institutions around the world (Stagg, 2013; Schwarz, 2012; Buckingham, 2003).

In July, 2013 I therefore began putting together designs for the user interface of what would become News on Atlas, a web application with the purpose of addressing this issue. I have been working closely with a programmer, Daniel Rivas, to develop the functionality of this application, while ensuring that it is easy to use and runs smoothly. Since its inception, the objective driving this application’s development has remained unchanged – to improve users’ global news literacy. This is an important area of international mindedness and, in my opinion, should be taught in schools alongside digital literacy.

References:

Buckingham, D. 2003. Media Education. Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture. Polity Press, USA

Pew Research Center. 2012. http://www.journalism.org/2012/10/25/social-media-doubles-remains-limited/

Powers, E. 2010. Teaching News Literacy in the Age Of New Media: Why Secondary School Students Should Be Taught to Judge the Credibility of the News They Consume. Washington University in St. Louis. http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1454&context=etd

Reese, S. 2012. Global News literacy: The Educator. Global News literacy: The Educator (Chapter prepared for News literacy: Global perspectives for the newsroom and the classroom). University of Texas at Austin. http://journalism.utexas.edu/sites/journalism.utexas.edu/files/attachments/reese/educator-chapter-final.pdf

Schwarz, F. 2011. Media Literacy and the News. Windesheim School of Media in Zwolle, the Netherlands. http://www.windesheim.nl/~/media/files/windesheim/research%20publications/120319_media_literacy_and_the_news.pdf

Stagg, L. 2013. International Mindedness: Global Perspectives for Learners and Educators. Urban Publications Ltd.