Thing 17

I spent some time with three web 2.0 winners for this task. Here are my thoughts on each of them:
Google Docs (http://docs.google.com/)
I've touched on this in an earlier post. I think google docs has great potential as a means for students to collaborate. I used it for the first time a few days ago. It was nice to be able to create a document at home and then have access at school without having to remember my thumb drive. It was also nice that the file was automatically converted to a .pdf file when I printed it. I wasn't able to find a print preview button which was a little irritating but overall I see this being something that I will be using more and more in the very near future.

Pbwiki http://pbwiki.com/
I am the director of color guards at Lowell Area Schools. During the winter season I have two competitive Winter Guards that travel all over the state to compete. I recently set up a wiki to organize our car pooling efforts. (http://exit52.pbwiki.com/) It's an easy way for the parents to sign up to drive without me having to sort through a whole in box full of emails. The parents are one by one starting to get on board with the new web 2.0 way of signing up to help. I also set up a page within the wiki to coordinate our volunteers for the show we are hosting in February. This event will have somewhere around 800-1000 spectators so take a lot of people to run smoothly. Wikis are already changing the way I do business in my role as Guard Director. I can see putting together research projects for my students in which they will add their thoughts to a wiki to come up with one end result.

My Heritage http://www.myheritage.com/
The last tool that I looked into was My Heritage. It's basically a web based version of Family Tree Maker. I started building a family tree with Family Tree maker last year but found it quite complicated and there were many search elements that were only available if you paid a fee. I didn't get into My Heritage in great depth but it looks neat because I can put in email addresses of the family members that I add and then they get an invitiation to add to the family tree. It looks like it is more or less Family Tree Make meets a Wiki. I'm not sure if I can link a family tree to any of my 7th grade math grade level content expectations or not but it might be something fun for the kids to do on their own.