 Today, I am going to go over several web 2.0 tools that will enhance creativity and innovation in your courses. And then this will spark a passion for your content area within your students. If you want to view the sources in a different format, you can visit my padlet, padlet.com slash k-o-f-e-l-d-t-c backslash creativity. Before we go into the tools, I kind of wanted to introduce web 2.0 or review it with some of you. A simple definition of web 2.0 is the read-write web. Originally, the internet was a place to locate information, mainly a read-only web. As the internet slowly changed, websites were developed that let people write, collaborate, and share information such as Wikipedia and Facebook. We live in a global, knowledge-based economy, and according to the common course date standards, students must master vital 21st century skills so they will be college and career ready. Here are the four skills that they must master, creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. I'm going to focus on creativity. And why is creativity important? We want to challenge students to think creatively, use a wide range of idea creation techniques such as brainstorming. I'm going to review a tool that will help you with this brainstorming strategy. We also want them to be able to create new and worthwhile ideas that are both incremental and radical. We want them to be able to elaborate, refine, and analyze and evaluate their own ideas in order to improve and maximize creative efforts. We want to be able to have students work creatively with others, develop, implement, and communicate new ideas to others effectively, be open and responsive to new and diverse perspectives, incorporate group input and feedback into the work. The originality, inventiveness and work can understand real world limits to adopting new ideas. We want them to be able to implement innovations as well. We want them to be able to act on creative ideas to make tangible and useful contributions to the field in which the innovation will occur. The reason why I'm listing these is because the tools that I am introducing to you will improve your implementation of these skills and your courses. And how do Web 2.0 and creativity go hand in hand? Creativity is actually at the heart of Web 2.0. Many of its tools open the doorways to creativity by helping students become multimedia content developers. Remember the importance of creativity as you consider these Web 2.0 teaching tools for use with your students. The first tool I'm going to introduce to you is Movely. It's a video creator tool. Here is the website movely.com slash education dash solutions. This is specifically their educator website. It is a timeline based video editor that comes with a library of images and backgrounds that can be used to easily tell a story. Each of the images comes with animation options that can really bring a video to life. Additionally, users can upload their own images and audio to enhance their projects. The finished product can be uploaded to YouTube, published to Movely, shared on Facebook, downloaded or shared through email. This tool will be great for digital storytelling, for creating flip classroom videos or for creating informative narrative or persuasive video projects. Utilizing Movely to unleash creativity. Let's take a look at what Movely looks like. When it comes to creating your Movely, you can sign up for a free account and can create a new move under your move. I'm going to create one with you right now, Introduction to Movely. As you can see with the free style and account to Movely, you only have the free styles and your moves, not the plus and pro styles. But there's still eight styles that are available to free accounts. So you can select an infographic style or a doodle marker style. So I'm just going to select a doodle marker style. When you first open up your Movely, you can take a quick tour. We're not going to tour right now because I'm going to walk you through it. You can include various graphics from the library and with those graphics, you can choose an animation and you can preview that animation by pressing play. So I selected the hand drawing. You can also include text, Introduction to Movely. I can also choose an animation with this as well. Let's see what it looks like. If you want your animations to align, you can use the time line to adjust. That overlapped too much, so I'll move it a little forward. Here are some big ideas that you can utilize in your classes. You can have students tell a story with Movely. You can have them introduce themselves with the resource or demonstrate a process. Create commercials for your class with Movely. Have students create persuasive videos such as a PSA. Teach the concept. Have students create a motivational video. Create promotional videos or a video invitation with Movely. Have students participate in a video challenge around a classroom theme or lesson. You can also create a video that highlights your classroom expectations in a memorable way. This is really going to stick with students the content that they create in Movely. The next tool I have for you is Tooset. It is a free online graphic organizer tool that provides different options of organizers. You can also create your own. It lets you paste online images, videos, virtual post-it notes, and more onto them and then you can share your creation with online collaborators. It's a step above the palette because you're putting that graphic organizer and then having students collaborate on it together and this will spark creativity and allow students that are struggling to see the ideas of others and use them as a springboard. Another creative tool that you can use with your students if you're a math teacher is Function Carnival. What is Function Carnival? It is a new site that lets you set up virtual classes. You can then have students watch videos and then have them create graphs based on what they see. Students watch a video, they try to graph what they see, and then they play back the video and see how their graphical model would be represented as an animation. This is what they meant to graph about the world, actually match the world. Students can really have fun with this and it gives them this nice visual representation of a math formula. The next tool I have for you is Canva. What is Canva? It's a new tool for creating infographics and this is a fun concept you can have students do to create visual representations of data and they have nice templates that students can use to create their infographics and to almost have a blueprint for them to get started. There are also wonderful visual presentation and communication skills. Then they can use Canva to create a visually pleasing digital. Canva is a wonderful tool to create designs and infographics. Here is the website interface and it's Canva.com and there are options to create album covers for podcasts, social media, presentation, poster, Facebook covers, blog graphics, a card, you name it, they really have it as a template available for you. I'm just going to select poster and so they're going to give me a bunch of poster layouts. If I choose this one, I can either select images from the library of images, I can also upload my own. So I have my image here, I'm going to upload more, you can drag them into the different areas, I notice that that doesn't fit so I'm going to look for a different image that does. I could stretch it out so you can really play around with it. An important thing to know is if you just want the free version not paid, they do have certain images and content in their library that does cost a dollar for each item that you use but there are a lot of free features that are available, a lot of graphics that you can add on top as well and like I mentioned before you can upload your own images into it to create a really great infographic for your students and you can even have them further use this product to create their own infographics because it is a really free for the most part and you just advise your students to use the free content to create infographics for your course. To submit and to submit, you can have them download the link and they can either save it as an image or PDF. They can also give you the link to submit. So again another wonderful web 2.0 tool that will really enhance creativity especially with having them submit different assessments for writing and introducing maybe an historical figure you can have them create a canva describing an historical event, a wonderful poster. Easy user interface that will really allow students to create these fun infographics that will inspire them and allows them to show off their products. The next tool I have for you is TAC. TAC is a free service that you can use to quickly create simple web pages. Using TAC you can create a page to announce an important event to advertise or to show off your best digital works. To create a TAC page you actually don't need to register for an account but unregistered TAC pages expire after 7 days. If you register for the service though, your TAC pages stay up indefinitely. Creating a TAC is a simple matter of uploading an image then adding TACs in the customizable fields above and below the image. TAC pages can accommodate videos, audio files, and maps. They also have great templates for you to start from which include class assignment, presentation, book report, lesson plan, and writing and essay. Here are some ideas for the classroom. You can create assignments where students should discuss world problems and find solutions to global issues through social streams used in TAC. You set up for the purpose. Use TAC for creating language learning assignments through citizen journalism projects. Students use TAC to create multimedia news stories. Create speaking practice assignments for assessments. Often students aren't uninspired by photos and course books and typical speaking questions and props. TAC can visualize and energize the whole experience. Create a collaborative multimedia blog post assignment where all students must add their piece to the social stream with their chosen multimedia. You can also challenge advanced and proficient students with TED Talk video links to challenges and communicative missions to do with speaking, presenting, agreeing, disagreeing, summarizing, converting to other forms of multimedia, etc. The next tool I have for you is ThingLink, and this allows you to create interactive images. ThingLink interactive images helps students develop 21st century skills and enrich their enthusiasm for learning. ThingLink works on all modern web browsers. Here are some specific ideas for your classroom. You can create interactive book talks. You can photograph groups of new books or groups of books on a topic or theme. You can add links to recorded book talks or ask students to create audio ads or video book trailers for each title and link them to the book cover. You can also make art talk. Ask students to record and listen to stories about their artwork or work of famous artists. You can listen to interviews, upload interviews to SoundCloud and then link to people in an image, for example community helpers, relatives, or veterans. This is a fun way to also create an interactive family tree. It makes the content really come alive for students. Now there is a pairing of ThingLink and TAC, where you can give your completed ThingLinks a home on TAC. The two resources are working together and coming soon is a one-click TAC creation from completed ThingLinks. This will allow you to create multiple ThingLinks on one subject and compile them together or show multiple ThingLinks as examples. You can create a TAC to add text, give the backstory or assignment details around your interactive image, and you can collaborate using the TAC stream to spark dialogue about the assignment. There are great example lessons on a TAC board which is called TAC.com backslash board backslash ThingLink. You can really use this to generate some ideas for you both of the resources in your classroom. To finish out I wanted to give you some of my favorite blog sites, free tech for teachers, purely paperless, edtech roundup, higher innovation, and speedofcreativity.org. I also have my own Weebly where I have compiled some of my favorite Web 2.0 and edtech resources. So please take a look at it and that's K-O-F-E-L-D-T-S-T-E-C-H-K-I-T dot Weebly dot com. I hope you found this to be informative and that it generated some good ideas for you to use these Web 2.0 resources to spark creativity in your classroom.