The Future is here: Web 2.0

     Web 2.0 represents a new way of creating, sharing, storing, distributing and manipulating digital information.

      The barriers between people and the Internet have never been so thin: people can not only access to a huge amount of information, but also can manipulate it, create it, and share it massively. We (teachers) should see this as an incredible opportunity to be creative/innovators in the classroom. We can find a lot of tools in the net that could help us to teach English in a more motivating and engaging way than ever, and guess what? Most of those tools are free! Now, let us show you some interesting ideas to implement these amazing tools in your teaching.

When teaching a foreign language, asking your students to write a story is always a great option to make them use the language in a creative and meaningful way. Storybird is a free site where you can design books page by page. 

It allows you to add text and images to transform your books into colorful and vibrant productions. This tool is interesting and useful, as it gives the students the chance to personalize their works in a fun and interactive way while they’re learning to write in another language. Once your students finish their stories, they can share it online with hundreds of people around the world, isn’t it amazing? This site is completely safe, and also, you can move through it easily as the information is clear and neat and it doesn’t contain spam. 

Another interesting tool is Popplet. Sometimes students don’t take notes when we teach them new vocabulary, and then, when they need to use it, they just don’t have it. A good way of having vocabulary organized in a simple and attractive way is by the making of mind maps. This site is completely free, and you can start creating mind maps as soon as you access to it. 

You can ask your students to create a mind map using all the vocabulary that they have learnt during a lesson, or maybe, if they have computers in the classroom, they can write the words as you write them on the blackboard. In that way, the students can have different mind maps for each topic that you deal with, and whenever they need to use that vocabulary they can use their mind maps. A good option would be to print the mind maps and ask your students to collect them in a folio in their note books. This tool also allows students to be creative and personalise everything they do: they can use different colours, as many boxes as they wish, and images. You can also download it as a PDF file, which makes it much more easy to take it everywhere you need  and then print it.

These are just two of many tools that you can find on the Internet. Here you can take a look at others: Teachers' Favored Web 2.0 Tools. If you want to get more information about what Web 2.0 is, you can visit this site: Web 2.0.