Web 2.0 is a way to say people are using the web in a different way now than they did a few years ago. More on the details of this later. But with that, there are hundreds, no, thousands of new tools, just for language learning. I will include my favorite 100 in this series, but there some people might like to explore more widely. For that you need to find a good directory of learning tools for web 2.0 activities. Here it is. Learning tools
YouTube was the most important site on the web in 2006. Millions of people are putting up videos of every possible subject, so if you need some authentic language for your class, it is easy to find. It is still a very popular place to put up videos. This really does spice up your classes. Be careful, though, some of the language and images can be a little rough.
iGoogle is a great portal, a web page that acts as a window onto the web.
Using iGoogle, I can access all of my important information with a single click. My Gmail and appointments, my To-do list, my RSS reader, even a quote for the day. I leave this open on my desktop all day long, and use it as my channel to the web. You sign up for Google, and you can make a page just as you want to. If you want to change the layout, just move the parts with your mouse.
Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are fine, but Google has a feature in their webmail that makes it much better to use. You can tag your email with labels, and then dump the emails all into one big folder. Don’t worry, because the search is fantastic. I can always find messages that I have saved.
And you can save a lot of them. Google gives you many megabytes to store your email messages. I even have Google go get my school email so I can access from anywhere.
Mozilla didn’t stop with Firefox, they also made a great email client. It is much easier to use than Outlook, especially when moving email messages from one computer to another. All of the email messages are stored as simple text files, in a standard format that almost any program can read, so you can export your emails to other programs if you want (but who would want?).
Email clients as software are a little old fashioned. Many students use web-based email programs, such as Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Gmail from Google. Actually, among seven different ways to communication electronically, university students use email the least. More about the other ways to communicate with students in other tools.