I selected the eHow (http://www.ehow.com/) website/tool from the list of Web 2.0 award winners because I have seen links to eHow in the results of Google searches. I wanted to further explore the site itself and see its potential use in a traditional education environment, like my future classroom.
eHow is a resource that links users to over 2 million instructional posts created by experts of that respective field. This resource is an education forum at its foundation since it is basically a How-To-Do-It-Yourself website. You can search directly for a topic through the text search box or browse through a multitude of content topics. Although I like and use Youtube as an instructional video source, I see the value of trying eHow first. eHow will inherently filter out any noise that you would have to search through on Youtube since it only shows instructional or educational content. If your toilet breaks with guests on the way to your Superbowl party, you need a source that directly gives you step-by-step instructions to diagnose and fix your toilet in a hurry! Youtube has many videos on this, but you will probably have to filter through all of the toilet jokes and bored kids blowing up toilets. eHow will take you right to several posts by experts with many of the newer posts including video for you to follow along. Each post also allows users to make comments to the instructions or help out other struggling viewers, thereby making a community of eHow users. The downside to eHow is the instructions on a specific topic that you are looking for may not have been posted, yet. Also, I think a more advanced Search engine would prove helpful at narrowing down many of the topics. As of now, you have the choice of viewing results with everything, just articles, or just videos.
Aside from these drawbacks, I think eHow is an excellent resource that can be applied to a formal education setting. Not only can teachers find instructions on how to create different lesson plan formats, but eHow could be used as a source of differentiated instruction. For example, I searched for "Quadratic Equation," a topic I assure you I remember very little about. I found articles describing how to solve these equations or teach the topic. I saw videos that did the same, as well as videos describing the everyday applications of quadratic equations, such as in the creation of contact lenses (who knew!). As for a classroom, sometimes a teacher cannot get through to a student no matter how hard a teacher tries. Why not direct that student to another format to receive step-by-step instructions on a difficult topic?
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