Social integration was becoming popular on the internet. People could interact with their favorite blogs by publishing comments to the posts. Then the commenters could comment to one another's comments. Social interaction was taking place in very public ways on the internet. Communities began to emerge around these site.

So Web 2.0 refers to internet activity that supports community and social interaction through the web. It is a growing lifestyle among the young people as they share their ideas, media, and other content over the web, building extensive social connections and relationships with people they may never know in the physical world.

Wikipedia Link: Web 2.0
Related Wikipedia Links:

• Authentication 2.0
• Blog
• Collaborative learning
• Collaborative Networked Learning
• Collaborative learning-work
• Comparison of accounting software
• Comparison of e-mail clients
• Comparison of office suites
• Consumer-generated media
• List of online spreadsheets
• Crowdsourcing
• Enterprise 2.0
• Generation C
• Learning 2.0
• Library 2.0
• List of office suites
• List of personal information managers
• Mashups
• Media Studies 2.0
• Micro-blogging
• Mobile office
• Office 2.0
• Office Suite
• Photo sharing
• Service-oriented architecture
• Social bookmarking
• Social computing
• Telecommuting
• Travel 2.0
• Web operating system
• Wikipedia
• Web 3.0
• Web desktop
• Web office

The information for this group is updated by the OneBillionBulbs.com website when new members join my group and submit how many light bulbs they have replaced. The updated information then appears automatically in my sidebar. If you join my group, you can see how this works.

Widgets can be many things. You could have a widget in your sidebar from weather.com that provides the weather forecast for a particular zip code. You could include a famous quotations from history widget, a web cam capturing live shots at a particular location in the world, etc.

A word of caution, adding widgets can be fun but can also be overdone. Widgets slow down the time it takes your page to load in a users browser because your blog has to retrieve the information from the other site. If the other site's server is down, this could cause problems with your blog even appearing.

To help decrease the amount of time a blog takes to load, large picture files should be avoided. In fact, depending on the monitor of the end user and the resolution setting of that monitor, many of the pictures taken with todays inexpensive digital cameras will not even fit on the computer screen. Introducing the thumbnail! A thumbnail is a small version of a larger picture. The user can see the thumbnail and decide if s/he wants to take the time to see the larger picture. If yes, all the user must do is click on the thumbnail, and the larger picture appears usually in a new window.

I personally think it's always a good idea to use thumbnails. This post features an example of a thumbnail that is aligned to the left side of the post. Click on the thumbnail (which is only about 100 pixels wide) to see the larger version. Notice that it takes a little bit of time to download the larger image, which is a tiny file (only about 100 kilobytes in size, and measures about 750 pixels wide).

• About
• Contact
• Picture Gallery
• Links

Each of these sections might be a separate page. For example, the About page could contain information about you, your school, your classes. In many blog systems you can include links to help your readers navigate to these special pages. The navigation links are often placed under the banner or in the sidebar by editing the template of those areas to include them.

Wikipedia Link: Blogroll

So the template tells the blogging system what stuff you want on your blog and how to organize that "stuff" on your blog.

Here is a screen shot from the Template settings on Blogger. Click the thumbnail to enlarge it more. Each section (or what I referred to as template tag in the text above) can be moved around on the page, changing what will appear where on your main page.

Each post always has a permanent link to that individual post. So when it disappears, you can use that link to go to the post. Sometimes the permalink, as it is called, appears under the post and says: permalink. Sometimes the title of the post is also a permalink to that post.

So how do you get the permalink to a post that no longer appears on your main page? You can use your blog's search function to find the post. Locate the permalink on the post when you find it. And then you can paste that link in a new post to refer to the original post.

Here's an example:
"Remember class, we first learned about the order of operations three weeks ago. You can refresh your memory by clicking on this link to that post. Now we will learn an additional step to this process." In this example you would include the permalink to the original post, which has long since disappeared from your blog's main page, on the order of operations in the bold text.

Click on the permalink in the footer of this post to see what an individual entry link produces.

In the school setting, when comments are open, I would strongly suggest you moderate all comments. While some more advanced blog systems allow the owner to restrict comments to members only, usually anyone in the world can comment rather anonymously to your blog if you open comments. Comments can be a powerful and positive tool. They can also be very abused. Spam can also be posted in comments advertising anything you can imagine.

If you choose to allow comments, teaching your students how to comment appropriately is just as important as teaching them to ask meaningful questions in class. Comments that are reflective and represent intelligent behaviors are a welcomed addition to the learning process. Comments that are inappropriate, offensive, or unrelated to learning can minimize the effectiveness of this learning tool.

One final word on comments: I have referred to comments as being open (on) or not available at all (off). But comments can also be closed. Most blog systems allow you to open comments and then, after you feel the need for the comments has passed, close the post to comments. When comments are closed, the reader can see the previous comments that were published to the post but can not add a new comment.

Think of ways you could use comments to enhance learning on your blog. What are the trade-offs involved?

[As a teaching tool, I have opened comments to this blog. Counting on your professionalism as part of this learning community, I have not chosen to moderate the comments, so comments are not required to be approved before they appear. To comment to a post simply click on the word "Comments" in the footer of each entry. The number next to the word "Comments" indicates the number of comments already published to that post. My comments are set up to require the commenter provide an email address. Under what conditions might this be wise in the school setting?]

But the blogging system is adding extra information to your post for you. It knows who you are based on how you logged in, so the system assigns your name as the author: Post by: Tim Tyson. It also looked at the clock on your computer to get the date and time you published your post and saved that information with the post too: Posted by: Tim Tyson on June 19, 2007, at 9:31PM. The blogging system then files all of this away neatly for you and your visitors.

So when a reader clicks on the June, 2007, archive link in the sidebar, the blogging system knows to bring up that post that was posted by: Tim Tyson on June 19, 2007, at 9:31PM, and all of the other posts with a publication date in the month of June, 2007. This is part of the archiving process that makes blogging systems so popular. Archives keep things neatly organized! There are usually three types of archives created by most blogging systems:

• Date-based
• Category-based
• Individual Entry-based

Each entry is automatically filed away in each of these areas. I just explained the date-based archive in the paragraph above. Now let's look at the category-based archive. If you associated a post you published back in 2005 with a "Curriculum" category and a reader clicks on the "Curriculum" archive link today, your post from 2005 will be included in the list of all of the posts you ever assigned to the "curriculum" category. The blog never forgets. It never loses your post. It always knows where to find things!

The last type of archive is individual-entry-based. It's just that--a link to one individual entry. It is a permanent link that never changes and only applies to that one single post. Each post you publish is assigned this permalink. You can learn more about the permalink by clicking on this link (which is the permalink for the post about the permalink!). The permalink is an individual entry-based archive. It is a permanent link to an individual entry you have published. When you clicked on the "Curriculum" category archive link mentioned in the paragraph above, you got a complete list of all of the posts in that category. Each title in the list is a link to that single entry. If you click on the title (a permalink), you go to that individual entry. You can use these individual entry-based archive permalinks (now that was a mouthful) in a variety of ways discussed in this post on permalinks.

Notice a search field in the sidebar of this blog. Try it out to see how it works. Your students and parents will love the search feature. Truth be told, you will love it too as your blog grows and becomes really large.