Luis: Social Networking

Facebook:

App:  http://www.educatina.com/
This first Facebook page that I came across is called Educatina. This is considered more of a Facebook app then just a page, but it’s definitely a useful tool that is presented on Facebook. This app presents material in Spanish. From math concepts to history learning, Educatina presents many different subjects in Spanish. Once you have added his app to your Facebook page you are able to view many different videos.

http://www.facebook.com/autismspeaks
I came across an autism page that has more than one million followers. It looks like a pretty powerful page. As I was going through this page I found many different stories of people with children with autism and there were also different tools and resources that are available to people that had liked the page. This page also share a unique tool for people in that it has an online chat form that is also open to people that like the page. Once they have liked the page they are able to participate in these chats. The special thing about this online form is that they get to chat with doctors. Another cool thing that this Facebook page does is it gives links to its web page and also their twitter account.  

CLASSROOM 2.0:

Distant Collaboration
As I was searching through this website I typed in, Spanish Teachers, in the group tab and it gave me 16 different groups that mention Spanish language. The first group that I found was distance collaboration learning. When I opened this page I found that teachers had posted or were looking for other opportunities to interact with other Spanish speaking classes so their students could practice more. This ranges from middle school to high school.  

Teaching Spanish with web 2.0 tools
I found another group under, “Spanish Teacher” was called, Teaching Spanish with web 2.0 tools. This group has a blog where they share tools they have found and used in their class. Within their blogs they direct you to the website and they also explain how they used it in class. This would be a great way to interact with other educators and share tools that have been used. With this we get a better understanding of what works and what didn’t work. I feel that if this website is used in effectively I can serve as a great tool with endless possibilities. 

For an app that I reviewed was entitled the US History Tiimeline. It starts in the era of pre-columbian and goes all the way up through 2011. It is a very thorough and remarkable source. It has every major event that occurred and many lesser known events, an example is the Declaration of Independence, then smaller events such as the Teapot Dome Scandal. All the events go in order by date and as a person scrolls down most of the events which there are close to two hundred I am guessing have an arrow icon which indicates that there is more information that needs to be viewed. When this is done a  little (w) icon appears and a whole new page appears much like a wiki. The timeline goes from very simple to just a huge resource and can go very in depth on one specific subject.

This could be a great resource for both students and teachers alike. It could serve as a great lesson planner and it could also be used to make a quick reference to a question or if more information is needed just in general. For students it could serve as a fabulous review source and a study guide. Also if they were not able to get all the notes is class they could go back for a quick review or if they are assigned a project topic. Overall, it is amazing this app was free because so much information and multiple pictures are provided and I feel would greatly benefit students and teachers alike because it gives such a comprehensive overview of many different subjects and time periods. This app would probably best be suited for high schoolers but younger grades could use it as well.

I downloaded a few other Apps but many of them have a cost. For example, I downloaded the App Biography Booksthinking that I could get short bios on multiple historical figures but it turns out for each biography a person wants to read they must pay, however it all depends on how valuable the resource is to teh person. There are also a ton of historical games like trivia and other that could be useful if they were used in the right context.