There are more ways to create content for “Web 2.0″ sites like this one than any one person could ever track; more tools come into play literally every day.

There are a few things in common between nearly all of them, however. They are usually free, at least in their “basic” versions, and most need a one-time user sign-up, where you take out an account. And almost all employ the powerful tool called “tagging”, which is just what we do when we select categories for our posts to this blog.

We’re going to pick out half a dozen of the most straightforward tools and introduce them here.

If you have a webcam and an internal microphone built into your computer, this is probably the very fastest way to create and publish a “talking head” style video of yourself. So if you’re the kind of person that might like looking right at us while you tell us what you think, give it a try. It will create a link for your video that you can share by blog or email.

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Know how to make a power point presentation? If you think your powerpoint slides are informative enough to stand alone and tell your story, you can upload the presentation to the slideshare site and it will turn it into a video that can be displayed (“embedded”) in a blog post.
And if the presentation needs your audio remarks to have it make sense, you can record them very simply as a soundtrack to accompany the show.

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Make a slideshow photo essay on Flickr. Just upload your photos to Flickr and use tags to group them into a photo essay. Provided you have asked your viewers to click “show info” as the slideshow runs, they’ll see the text you have included with each photo. Here is an example of one I made of a family outing, but could be a photo essay of anything.

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Create your own blog. You can customize its look and add whatever features you like. You can use to keep daily journal entries -or create any sort of content you like- just as you would with the class blog. You can use WordPress – since you already have an account – or Blogger or Tumblr or others. Again, be sure to give a common tag to each post that is part of your response; that tagset becomes your topic that you can share with us via a post to the class blog.

Tip : Your blog ID doesn’t have to be you. It’s not ID theft if  you pretend to be exploring a topic through the eyes of an historical personage, or a fictional character.

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Create professional audio! You can create your own mp3 by downloading free “Audacity”software, and include any combination of spoken voice, sound effects, captured audio, or music. Once you have your mp3 it can be simply uploaded to the class  blog by clicking the musical note icon at the top of your blogpost editor.

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Old-school! Draw or paint an image by hand – or write a poem- or create a visual artifact of any type that can fit into or onto a scanner .

Upload the image to your blog post using the toolbar above the post editor.

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Microblog! Sign up to a microblog service like Twitter and start posting on a relevant topic to this course. There is a 140 character limit — just enough space to introduce a link or share a thought — and by adding a # before your topic name you can creat a “hashtag” that will group  your microblog posts ( or “Tweets”) around a common topic. That “topic” you develop over, say two dozen tweets, could become your response. Others can find your work by entering that hashtag name, even if they do not have a Twitter account. You can collaborate with other Twitter users, and if they contribute to your thread –provided they use the same hashtag –their responses will become part of your project. Click here to see how it would work ; try entering #monsanto to see the real time conversations playing out across the world at the very time of your search.

Again, like the point made in the “wordpress” section above, your microblog ID doesn’t have to be you! One very popular twitter user is exploring life in closed communities by pretending to be a witty Amish teen on the run from a forced marriage. Everyone knows it is a created narrative, and it is played for humour rather than for serious anthropology, but it shows the possibilities of the form.

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How are your wiki skills? This organization has donated over 100,000 free wiki domains to K-12 educators in the past 4 years; there is a good chance an institution you are associated with is using one of them. Could they use some Social Justice resources? You might be able to build your local wiki’s ” Social Justice capacity” and meet the requirements for some ED 870 coursework at the same time. Check with Dr. Spooner first, of course!

The great thing about any wiki, even wikipedia, is that they use exactly the same kind of editing template you have learned to use in your WordPress posts, so, no learning curve!