'Web 2.0 paljastaa' photo (c) 2011, Janne Ansaharju - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/

In yet another attempt to get at the enormous backlog I have of sites worth blogging about, I’ve recently begin a regular feature called “The Week In Web 2.0.” (you might also be interested in The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education In 2013). I also sometimes include tech tools that might not exactly fit the definition of Web 2.0:

Tackk is a neat tool for creating online “posters” and is on The “All-Time” Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly list. They’ve just announced a special education page with class-related templates and examples.

Formatically is a new free online tool I haven’t really explored it yet, but they see that it “will actually format an entire essay in MLA, excluding the individual citations. Here’s a video about it:

I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning Research & Citation Skills.

Reading Recs is a new feature of the extraordinary site, SAS Curriculum Pathways. It’s a new tool that allows students to orally read and record passages that teachers can listen to at a later time. You can read about other similar tools, and the concerns I have about them, here.

TechCrunch writes about a new site that’s designed to reduce the college drop-out rate called Get Set. It:

is taking an algorithmic approach to the drop-out problem, building a natural language processing (NLP) engine that asks students to feed it with data about their college aims and problems which it uses to match students to others who have similar goals/backgrounds or who had the same sort of issues previously and overcame them.

I’m very pessimistic about its chances of success because I don’t think these kinds of challenges can be helped much via anonymous computer screens but, at the same time, I think it’s very, very intriguing. And the reason I feel that way is because it’s a creative tech solution that seems to mirror a successful research project that used a similar tactic done face-to-face, and which I wrote about in my Washington Post piece, The manipulation of Social Emotional Learning. You’ll see a lesson taking this research into account for high-schoolers in my upcoming third book on student motivation.