The other popular online publishing platform that has become well-used by
secondary school teachers and learners is the wiki. The term comes from the
Hawaiian for ‘quick’ and a wiki is a collaborative web space allowing for pages that
can be created and edited by multiple users easily without any knowledge of web
design. The wiki is similar to the blog in that it allows for quick and easy publishing,
but the more flexible structure of the wiki means that it is good for project work,
whilst the blog is better as an ongoing record of classwork as the latest work is
always displayed at the top of the page.
Another development of Web 2.0 is the podcast, which comes from the combination
of the words iPod and broadcast. Podcasts are audio or video files that are broadcast
via the internet and can be downloaded and listened to on a computer or mobile
device. Apart from software allowing the creation and sharing of podcasts, there
are many other Web 2.0 tools that make use of audio, and to many users podcasting
now refers to any creation and sharing of audio online.
Our next case study is an example of a teacher who uses Web 2.0 tools, especially
audio, with her classes.