What is Web 2.0 Tools ? - English Language Teaching

Hello Readers!

Web 2.0 Tools is the advanced version of Web 1.0. First and foremost let's get some idea about the word "Web". Web is a tightly connected word with internet. We know about WWW - World Wide Web, that contains millions of websites as a directory record.

Now let's see what is Web 1.0.

In the early years of 1990s, when computers were new and it was fascinating to see the "Hello World" in the CRT screens, it was difficult to access the internet and also difficult to have the luxury of even computer. During 90s or before 90s, much of HTML coding skills and technical knowledge about computer language was required in order to add content to the web pages. This was the time of Web 1.0 when internet and web browsing was limited to only specific class of people. Back then, internet web was also called as "Read Only Web". The flow of content was in one direction which is top to down. Knowledge and content was made available on web by developers and masses used to read whichever is on the internet.

But within a decade, internet started changing drastically. It was a big transformation took place in terms of adding content to the web pages online. As a result, a new generation of web based tools emerged which are now called as Web 2.0 Tools.

There are several examples of Web 2.0 Tools.

Annotation from Coursera MOOC

Blogger (1999), Gmail(2004), Facebook(2004), Twitter(2006), Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube(2005), Yahoo! (1994), Wikipedia(2001) are the popular Web 2.0 tools.

These Web 2.0 tools allowed anyone with an internet connection to create and upload content to the web at a very low cost, even free.

There are many other tools categorized base on the needs of people. There are eight/8 categories of Web 2.0 Tools.

1. Communication Tools - Yahoo mail, Gmail, Skype, MSN, Hangouts, etc.

2. Collaborative Tools - Google Slides, Google Foms, Docs, Jamboard, Sheets etc.

3. Creativity Tools - Blogger, Wordpress, Penzu etc.

4. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Tools - Wordle, Pedlet

5. Social Networking Tools - Facebook, Twitter, Orkut(2004), WhatsApp(2009)

6. Presentation - SlideShare, Scribd

7. Reflection and Feedback - Kahoot!, Mentimeter etc.

8. Productivity - Google Sites, Blogger, Wikipedia, Quora

Now let's see what are the tools that can help learn English Language.

The table below is full of hyperlinks. You can access some of the tools by clicking on their names.

Web 2.0 Tool	English LSRW Skill learnt from Tool
Blogger, Wordpress Penzu, Social Networking tools	Reading, Writing
Wikipedia, Google Books, Internet Archive, Open Library	Reading
Audacity, Sound Cloud, Podomatic, Google Podcasts	Listening, Speaking
Quora	Writing, Reading
YouTube	Listening, Speaking, Reading

The following MOOC from Coursera helped me a lot understating and knowing more about Web 2.0 Tools. It is worth auditing and worth learning course. This helped me a lot in writing this blog post. Here is the link of the course.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/teaching-learning-tools

Image Attribution of Web 2.0 Wordle

By Original by Markus AngermeierVectorised and linked version by Luca Cremonini - Based on The huge cloud lens bubble map web2.0 web20map.pngVectorised and linked version from Web 2.0 Map Web_2.0_Map.svg, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1522976

Thank You!