TEC 950- Social Bookmarking

Through my years of teaching, I have learned not to hoard items, such as books, worksheets, 'tools'. If I have not used it recently, or I could easily find it, I am learning not to keep it. The same goes for my use of different sites, and articles. Now, i often print articles or posts because I prefer to read 'offline'. When I come across an article I'd like to share or post to my blog, I just stack it, physically. Thankfully it is only one stack, but it gets bigger and bigger depending on the season of my life.

If I were to read more things online, I would need a better way than just bookmarking into a folder, which works but can get crazy depending on how many sites I've visited. Enter Diijo or Delicious. these bookmarking sites promise a way to save all those articles that I read online, well, online. At the beginning of this Program, we signed up for Diijo and I was looking forward to checking out Delicious.

However, one of my sayings is that "tech is great when it works". Annnddd...it didn't. Delicious is down until July 24 because they are doing work on their servers. One of the articles I read was saying that Delicious is more user friendly for in class use, so I was looking forward to checking it out. The big plus is using the "tags" function, where you label the articles you find so it is easier to filter and share out certain links, instead of all of them.

Diijo works nicely to bookmark websites or highlight certain parts of an article. Honestly, though, for either of these, I don't know the likelihood of me visiting these sites much personally, and we'll have to wait and see if this will be something to use with my 3rd graders. I may be able to do what I would need for my kiddos by using my G Sites page to gather these things. (Part of my goal for next year is to not inundate my students with a ton of sites, but really dig deep with just a few)

As with any new tool I learn about, I always try to filter it through my "usage filter". I ask myself a couple questions. 

1) Can I use this in my classroom? 

2) Will it save any time? 

3) Can I take the concept and use a tool I (or my kids) already know? 

4) How will this make me more effective as a teacher?

I can see the value in using this kind of tool because of ALL the content out there, it can be difficult to organize and access later, when needed. Helping my kids be thoughtful about which sites they are using and being purposeful about how they organize them will be a lifelong process to more effective communication and collaboration and aid in becoming a useful digital citizen. These tools, or something similar could be just what they (and I) need.

Derrick