~an online file cabinet of saved web pages~ (furl.net)
Eureka! Social bookmarking has been the best invention ever! It is about time that I found a tool that allows me to work smart and not hard. My URL folders always seem filled to the brim with great educational websites but they end up in such an unorganized mess that I can't retrieve anything without a whole lot of frustration and wasting a whole lot of time!
Second common scenario with me: big epiphany --it dawns on me that there is this cool website that I viewed at home that would really work well with the lesson that I am currently teaching at school... I end up spending my whole planning time desperately looking for the website in question because it is bookmarked on my home computer and I am not --argh!
Registering with del.icio.us was a piece of cake and so was importing all of my 774 urls from my home iMac too. It was nice to see my bookmark chaos get organized at the click of a button!del.icio.us will definitely help me manage my "reading list" in a much more effective way. At last, I will be able to access my bookmarks from anywhere and no matter which computer I use. Another feature I liked and that was also available with Furl is that it is possible to highlight text on the website that will be saved along the tags you create --no need to scan the whole website for the part you thought would be good to quote in your research paper! How brilliant! One thing I haven't figured out yet with del.ici.ous is out to have my tags displayed as cloud tags --being visual, I really like how the size of the tags in the list reflects their popularity. Another feature that I liked that Ma.gnolia offered and del.icio.us doesn't have is that the tags are separated with commas. With del.icio.us, I am having a hard time staying consistent with my folksonomy --sometimes I tag a website Character.Education, another time CharacterEducation, and yet at other times Character_Education... I need to find a way to remain consistent. At any rate, I love the ability to search websites by giving keywords like ESL or French and see the plethora that pops up, knowing that I will be able to locate the gems I found again in the future without a lot of sweat and exasperation!
An application that I thought that I could theoretically use del.icio.us with my students is for a research project. I could create a unique tag & then have students post their findings of the topic under the shared tag. This way I could monitor their research and my students could piggy-back on each others' discoveries. Yet at this time, I still have to figure out how I would set all this up to work for a whole classroom...
An application that I thought that I could theoretically use del.icio.us with my students is for a research project. I could create a unique tag & then have students post their findings of the topic under the shared tag. This way I could monitor their research and my students could piggy-back on each others' discoveries. Yet at this time, I still have to figure out how I would set all this up to work for a whole classroom...
3 comments:
Love, love, love this one! For all the reasons you mentioned in your post.
774?! Really?! You are quite the internet researcher. Your idea for using tags with your students should be fun and interesting.
If you figure out ( and I know you will) how to track your students research project by creating a unique tags, let me know. I would love to use it in my classroom.
I'm hoping they give us some time to collaborate and create new projects using these tools that we have learned this summer.
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