Web 2.0 is a trend in World Wide Web technology. Generally speaking, it is the second generation of web-based communities and hosted services such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, podcasts, and folksonomies, all of which aim to facilitate creativity, information sharing, collaboration, and sharing among users.

Energize your classroom: Need somewhere for students to work together on essays, research, stories, or book reports? A wikispace for a class is a great place for students to post their work so that teachers and classmates can correct, improve, and discuss their work.

Wikispaces is great for any kind of group website. It's for families, classrooms, sports teams, community groups, book clubs, fan clubs, party organizers, and more. Learn more about what Wikispaces can do.

iTunes: Popular, and free, podcast reader. Includes a slew of other usefull features.

Juice: A free podcast reader. Juice does not have all the options as iTunes, but a capable and robust podcast reader.

Audacity: Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. Don't forget the LAME MP3 encoder that allows exporting of MP3 files.

IPS PodCasting

Podcasting is a method of publishing or distributing multimedia content (i.e. audio and video) over the Web. Podcasts are made available through syndication feeds, which enable new content, or episodes, to be automatically delivered to a personal computer. Users subscribe to podcasts that are pushed to aggregators, also called podcatchers. The podcast can then be played on a personal computer or MP3 player.

Educational Uses: Podcasting can be used whenever audio, particularly the human voice, and/or video will enhance student learning. One obvious use of podcasting in an educational context is to create an archive of class lessons that students can listen to at their convenience. However, given the distinctive features of podcasting, its potential goes far beyond reproducing course materials and making them available for review. Since many podcasts resemble radio-style broadcasts, they are commonly used for news and updates, and because podcasting provides automatic updates to anyone who subscribes, it provides an easy means of delivering up-to-date content to students, for playback at any time or any place. Instructors can use podcasting technologies to deliver to students items such as the following:

• news/updates
• guest speakers
• student presentations
• interviews with guest experts
• student-produced podcasts
• feedback/evaluations of student work
• short lessons that help students develop listening and speaking skills