By Leah Henderson


NASA is a great place to learn all about space! You can learn about the Solar System, Sun, Moon and Stars! You are able to view video, images and podcasts. It also has a blog, RSS feeds, and Multimedia features.







Learning about the Astronauts is very interesting and educational. There are research tools to help students of all ages with homework.







The is even a Kids club, full of color pages, games, and information about Greenhouse Effects.

Fact Monster (Laura Zalfa)

FactMonster is a very helpful website for young students. The website is very user friendly and makes learning fun. It was designed by Information Please as a tool for younger audiences. Students can easily fact-find. Users have access to time lines, almanacs, atlases, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and a homework center.

I think this is a great tool because it introduces young students to researching using Web 2.0 tools. It is a beginner website for finding useful educational information online. It is important to design websites for young students because they are the future and need to be introduced to Web 2.0 tools early in order to understand and be comfortable later on. Not only can young students use this website, parents and teachers will benefit greatly too!

We all know YouTube to be a place to upload and view videos. But, did you know that it could be a place to help you market your video. The reason is there's a feature in YouTube called Insight which monitors the statistics of your video. They include the age groups, how your video is being viewed (mobile device, youtube search, facebook, e-mail, etc), where the video is being viewed. Also, as soon as your video is uploaded you can set YouTube so that it'll automatically post it on Facebook as soon it's uploaded and processed. All these to me are a great as far as being able to determine marketing methods to get your videos out there.

Environmental Inspiration

By Leah Henderson
National Geographic is an amazing website of education and entertainment for people of all ages.
Whether your passionate about the environment, people, places, animals, or photography National Geographic is sure to have something that catches your eye.
Through amazingly descriptive writing and mind blowing photography National Geographic takes you on tour of our world and beyond. Your tour can be personalized by browsing the site and choose from many different maps, videos, photographs and even activities.

National Geographic even has a specific place for kids to visit and explore their world. Child friendly, facts, photos, videos, activities and even games that help children broaden their knowledge of the world, it's inhabitants and beyond.
National Geographic also offers a broad spectrum of educator resources on their Education tab. Here educators can find maps, news, photos, audio/video and newsletters and much more.
Go to National Geographic and begin your very own amazing tour!

Notely (Shannon Doherty)

Notely is a Web 2.0 tool that allows students to take notes and store them online in a type of digital notebook. A major advantage of this tool is the ability to access class notes from any computer with an internet connection. Also some students will find it faster to type up their notes rather than hand-write them and will feel it's easier to organize them on the computer. Furthermore, used over time this tool can create a digital storage locker or portfolio of notes that a student has taken during the course of his or her academic career, allowing for easy reference and a look back on prior classes taken. Notes saved with Notely are also fully searchable, which can save time when you are unsure of which lecture the desired information was presented. Highlighting and pictures can also be inserted into the notes. And for the environmentally conscious and those wishing to go paper-free, the use of Notely means the use of significantly less paper!

Notes stored with Notely are easily downloadable as pdf files, Microsoft Word Documents (.doc), and simple text files (.txt). They can also be emailed to anyone, for example a student who missed class. And if you need a paper copy, printing is easy!

While its name may be deceiving, Notely actually boasts a lot more features than a basic note taking tool. A particularly helpful application allows you to list your "to-dos" and tasks, such as homework due dates, study reminders, test dates, or group project meetings. A fully functional calendar tool is available so that a student can glance at his or her upcoming assignments or tests.


Contact information of classmates can be stored for easy access when you have a homework question or want to organize a study session. This is currently a free tool, so it wouldn't be a financial burden for students or educators.

I believe the application of a note-taking Web 2.0 tool, such as Notely, with additional time-management features, would be a powerful tool to keep students on track and organized and also present a unique, easily accessible digital notebook for students to store and view their notes.

And for those on the fence, Notely offers a complete video tour of their websites, including video instruction of how to use the service. They also have a demo account that anyone can log into and get a feel for the tool before signing up!

(Images from Notely's website.)

My name is Laura Zalfa. I found a unique web2.0 tool! It is the website TRAMLINE, which features virtual field trips. This was developed in 1996 and is still being used today. This was developed specifically for educational use, to help organize the Web for students. The website is made by TourMaker© software. TourMaker© is the top tool for creating Virtual Field Trips and Web Tours.

This site is a free tool for grades K-12 educators anywhere! TourMaker can be used to guide students through a sequence of Web pages on any given topic. For each visited Web page, educators are provided a Narration frame. This is where teachers can write their own information concerning the web page, or instruct students to complete an assignment. Students can move forward and back through the Field Trip using the tour Control Panel.

I think this would be a great way for teachers to further connect with students. The internet is full ways we can be taking education a step further. Taking students on a virtual “tour” of a specific subject through different places on the internet is a great way to make the most of resources available to us. Students are mostly familiar with their social networking sites, and often times get lost when it comes to using the internet for school subjects. This is a great way for teachers to lead their students through the internet and direct them to appropriate and useful web sites.

I would like to see teachers become more modern for the next generations. We now live in a world where field trips do not have to consist of crowded buses and worrying about budgets! Teachers have much more opprotunity to teach students outside of the typical classroom setting.

Would you like a virtual field trip?

After trying Facebook out for the first time, I can see why social network sights are becoming very popular and important. I've heard some horror stories about myspace, but that's because I'm only hearing about how people use it to express themselves in very provocative ways. But, I've learned that social networking sites aren't all evil depending upon how they're being used.

The highest ranking people in this country are taking advantage of them in order to communicate information on a global or national basis through text, video, or pictures. Also to my own understanding, news media like Fox29 are taking advantage of social sites like twitter and facebook in order for people to quickly keep up with up to the minute information. This goes to prove that social networking could be educational because it keeps people informed of what's happening in this world.

Another so fascinating about social sites on the web, is that they can be accessed through a mobile device which means you can post anything while you're on the go. I do that with facebook, and I love it.


Social networking today was never possible back in the old days because we had very slow modems back then. Now with a high demand for broadband at cheap prices, that's not a probelem as the internet is starting to become more flash intensive in order to encourage interactivity and to create more appeal.

Take advantage of social networking sights for positive things like to encourage a friend halfway across the world. Add Joseph Ryan as your friend on Facebook if you have an account with them. Facebook could be really effective communication tool for this class. Have a good day.