Web 2.0 Resources to Promote Cross-Cultural Awareness and Connections
Educreations
There are many Web 2.0 programs that allow users to show what they know through videos composed of drawings, pictures, and voice commentary. These tools provide creative ways for students to share their knowledge with their classmates or a worldwide audience. ScreenChomp, Explain Everything, and EduCreations and three similar tools that allow students to create and share their presentations.
For the purpose of this summary, I will focus on the latter tool, EduCreations. Using EduCreations, a user creates slides composed of drawings and pictures. The user can then record and explain the slide while annotating if necessary. The presentation can be paused at any time to allow the user to set up the next slide. It is best to use a script while making an EduCreation, considering one cannot delete audio once it has been recorded. This could lead to some frustration, but if one is well planned and records audio in pieces, this can be a powerful media creation tool.
I love the idea of students sharing their knowledge with others outside of the classroom walls. According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, teaching others and explaining a topic is a means of guiding students to higher order thinking skills. This web 2.0 tool is great for assessing student knowledge, and then being able to share that knowledge outwardly. Students could even create an EduCreation as a means of sharing information about their lives and culture, and these could be posted to learning networks like Edmodo to be shared with educational communities.