Ten Web 2.0 Activities You Can Do With Your Kids

1. Go on a park hop.

Shared this with a few homeschooling families and they loved it! Start at home by searching for a few parks in a particular area. Use an online mapping tool to map out your day. When you’re at the park, give the camera to one of the kids to take a photo. It’s great seeing pictures of the parks from their perspective. Record that child’s thoughts about the location and features. Have the kids take turns being the photographer and reporter for each park. Later, map out the parks using place markers in Google Earth. My students decided to create a placemarker, upload their picture, type a few sentences highlighting the best features of the park. Now they can share the Park Hop Travel Guide with others.

2. Have an art day.

Turn up the music, set out materials, and get creative. Have each child choose their best masterpiece and take a picture of it. Upload the pictures to Art Snacks. While their, check out the other artists and find 3 pieces of art that you enjoy on the network. Choose a rating and leave a comment for those fellow artists.

3. Start a family blog.

Have each person be responsible to post on a particular day of each week. Teach your kids how to find a picture using creative commons, and how to give photo attribution. There are so many skills that can go into this one. Want a safe way for the kids to surf the internet or keep a family blog? Check out KidZui.

4. Write a song together and record it.

Upload it to your song and invite friends and family to listen to and post comments.

5. Create a digital storytelling project.

See what you can do with Photostory3. Document a family vacation, a trip to the zoo, or what your family does on an ordinary day.

6. Interview an older family member.

Have the kids write the questions and record the interview. Upload and share on YouTube or a video sharing site.

7. Plan a meal together.

Choose a theme and delegate the tasks. Have each child find one recipe online that you can add to your menu. Go back later and have them write a short review or post a rating for the dish. Create an original dish together and photograph it. Upload it to a recipe site and check back later to see what people think of it.

8. Review a book.

Check out an online bookstore such as Barnes and Noble, Jr., Borders, or Amazon and find a favorite book. Have each child write a short review. Consider choosing a new book or two to add to your library.

9. Become authors.

Publish your story and share it with others. Decide on a topic and map out the storyline. Give each person specific pages to write and illustrate. Transfer your story to a self-publishing website for kids like this one.

10. Create a movie

Check out Kerpoof Animation Studio. It’s free. Animoto makes it easy to create videos.

10 Cool Web 2.0 Activities To Do With Your Kids are great, but 12 would be even better; with one activity for each month of the year! Can you think of a great idea or two to add to this list?

Photo Attribution: Kidzui, TikaTok, Computer Keys: Lizzardo

Remember the social network I started this Fall?  The potential for collaboration and connecting was wonderful, but I felt we needed a larger group to make it more meaningful for you.  Well, I have good news.

A new social network, like the one we had, is being launched for our entire Homeschool Academy very soon!  I am putting on the finishing touches to the network and will be doing trainings for teachers in a few weeks.  When all of the teachers have been added, (hopefully around May 20th), the network will be launched.

I’ll send you an email invitation to join.  I’m really excited to open it up to others so you’ll have a chance to collaborate with more families, as well as connect with my other Homeschool families, on this network.   It will provide another place for us to communicate, besides this blog.  I look forward to inviting you a bit before everyone else, in hopes that you can help me by giving me feedback, before everyone else jumps in.

Here’s a sneak peak:

I’ve added 30 groups, on topics ranging from homeschooling methods, organization & scheduling, to gardening and sharing recipes.  If you have any suggestions or thoughts, please leave a comment here.

Here are a few groups…

Creative Commons Photo Attribution:  Starbucks Mocha Coffee by tskdesign

Check out Scientific American’s spotlight on Tim Berners-Lee.  A proposal he wrote twenty years ago became the blueprint for the World Wide Web.  The celebration took place earlier this month.

Read here to find out more:

•    Facts about the Web’s Creation

Read a few interesting facts about the Web’s early days.  “Information Mesh” was one of the early names suggested for the Web.  Another option was “The Information Mine,” of which the author, Mark Fischetti, shares that “Berners-Lee thought the acronym, TIM, was too egocentric!”

•    The Mind Behind the Web

I enjoyed reading about Tim Berners-Lee and his vision for the Web.  It’s amazing that it has come so far, so quickly.  It reminded me of my first experiences exploring the Internet.  Back then the service I had charged by the minute.  I would sign on, hurriedly gather information (as much as was possible with dial-up), and quickly sign out, in hopes that the bill didn’t get too high.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“By 1990 Berners-Lee had a fully formed vision: “Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked,” he thought. “All the bits of information in every computer at CERN, and on the planet, would be available to me and to anyone else. There would be a single, global information space,” a natural resource like air and water. The task left to him was to marry hypertext and the Internet.”

•    Remembering the Day the World Wide Web Was Born

In this article, Mark Fischetti writes about the early days of the Web:

“Berners-Lee accessed the first Web page, on the first Web server, using the first Web browser on Christmas Day 1990. Why did it take until 1993 before the public became aware of the creation?”

“Once Tim and Robert Cailliau established that the Web worked, they wanted to spread the word. After getting CERN to buy in, Tim spent 1991 flying around the world meeting with people who were interested in hypertext and the Internet and linking to create Web browsers to access what was a growing repository of information on Tim’s CERN computer. He also encouraged enthusiasts to start their own servers. From there, listservs helped spread the word; so did university computer science programs, which saw the coding of browsers and servers as a great way to get students to experiment. (One of the best known of these projects was headed by the University of Illinois’s Marc Andersen, who would later transform his creation into the Netscape Web browser.)”

“Tim began to get concerned, though, about universities and companies like Microsoft creating their own networks that might compete with the Web, or charging for content, which would violate his core principle: that everyone should be able to communicate freely with everyone else. To stop this from happening, he got management at CERN to release all of his source code under a general license so that any programmer anywhere could use it for free. He thought that if the whole world was building the Web together, no one company could take control of it.”

What do you remember about the early days of navigating the world wide web?

Here’s a great video to share with your kids when explaining how the World Wide Web works.