Week 4 - Wrap up

So this week we took a look at a few more web 2.0 tools, Google Maps, Webquest, Fakebook and Edmodo.  Had used Google Maps to create my own maps before but I was introduced to the Google Map game where you pin a location based on a question, called Smart Pins. This game was a little addicting and my daughter and I played it for to long. Webquest had 1,000s of different subjects to chose from and I allowed my daughter to pick a subject to explore and we ended up doing some nature exploring based on the teachers directions in the webquest. I did explore Fakebook and as some of my classmates pointed out the ability to take a character from history or even a book and develop a Fakebook page to conduct a book report is taking something old and making it new.  This combines our social networking with our education system.  I love the idea and hope that teachers are using it to change up the old book reports we all use to do in school.  I spent a lot of time with Edmondo this week and trying to compare it to Symbaloo.  I wonder if I am missing something because Edmondo has numerous more features and can become very interactive with a class.  I wish that Edmondo would allow you to set your groups to public or private to allow it to be more open if you wanted an open class to attract more people.  Where I feel like Symbaloo is a great way to create a webmix of shortcuts that are focused on a specific subject and share that webmix there is really limited interaction from there.  I do have it set as my home page and have links set up for my grad school and another webmix set up for some hobbies.