Sunday, June 14, 2009

Thing 33: Travel 2.0

Now this one is giving me the itch to get out of Dassel for awhile!

I like the idea of getting feedback from other travelers. This seems more credible than from the booking companies. Of couse, one needs to wade through the cranky people to see real insight. Some people are just always negative no matter where they go, but these bits of feedback can show a "trend" of feelings toward a destination. We used this when we went to Florida over spring break and found a GREAT pleace at a GREAT price. It was actually a nice timeshare resort that was not full to capacity so they were selling the empty space on Travelocity at a discount rate. It was a great deal!

WindowSeat and TripAdvisor looked good. I especially liked the TripAdvisor in that it gives a lot of good advice for first time or repeat travelers. I was checking out the first time Cruiser visitors section, and it looked great. After reading that, I'd feel more confident booking a cruise, and that's important during these tighter economic times when we must make every dollar count.

I did notice that the top two mashups were Twitter related. Maybe there are more decent applications than I gave Twitter credit for earlier. I'll try to keep an open mind on that one.

One that was not listed is WikiTravel. That's sort of a travel version of wikipedia. It's not too bad.

I think the most logical implementation for the media center is in the area of social studies. I could see some lessons that incorporate these tools. I'll definitely link some as reference tools.

Well, that's Thing #10 for me on the More Things on a Stick program. I plan to do more later since I'm teaching three Web 2.0 Tech Academy courses in August for our teachers, but I won't have time to officially complete more than that before the program ends on June 20th. I did want to at least meet the first threshold of achievement on this session, however.

Thanks again to Patricia Post and all those who have worked to make this program such a success. They have been GREAT and have allowed me to better stay up to date on the latest in the ever expanding world of web 2.0!

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