Thing #19 - Web 2.0 Award Winners

I looked at several of the award winner and found I liked the Lulu, Yelp and the LiveMocha web sites.

I didn't know there is a web site where you can publish your own books. Our school did this just this past March when we had two 2nd grade classes write a book about poems about Holidays and we sold the book at our 50th Anniversary Celebration. The book was published by children's author Vuthy Kuon's publishing company out of New York. His company did the cover design for us and we chose the title and cover color. They did all the rest of the designing for us as far as the layout of the poems, student photos and student biographies. I feel the pro to using Lulu would be you only purchase what you sell and you have more control of the overall design of the book. I feel one of the cons would be how difficult it would be to design the book. I visited their forum and there seemed to be a lot of people writing in with problems in trying to create their books. I plan on checking into Lulu further because we plan on having one grade each year work together in creating their own book. The two classes who did the publishing this past year loved it and other classes were asking to do the same. It really is a way to motivate students to write, and they love seeing their creations actually published in a "real live book." The title of the book we did for our 50th Celebration is "From Confetti to Candy Canes: A Collection of Holiday poems and haikus."

I also liked Yelp for my own personal use because I like reading reviews posted by real people. To check it out, I checked reviews for restaurants in Boston since I will be traveling there the end of the month. In reading the different reviews, it seemed like most of them were posted by the college age crowd. It might be helpful if you could search reviews based on gender, age, likes and dislikes, but that might be too much to ask. Anyway, I will probably visit it again but I still like my old standby web site, Tripadvisor.com.

I had heard of LiveMocha but was under the impression it cost money. I was surprised to find out it was free! I signed up for beginning Spanish classes and invited my two daughters to join. I also plan on making the teachers and staff at my school aware of this web site. Our school currently serves students speaking about twenty different languages, so this could be a valuable tool for our school community.