I presented at a workshop with 2 other teachers last Friday, as we talked, and shared out our interactive whiteboard activity URLs, they were commiserating that they had to switch laptops to find their own bookmarks. I asked if they had heard of Delicious? In a room of a dozen educators they all said no.
Stop the workshop! Time for a commercial break!
Where are your favorite bookmarks? Oh, on the home computer, the class computer or the laptop?But you need it now what can you do? Well, in a pinch you could google if you remember parts of the title, the address, but next time.....
You may have used Portaportal as a way to collect your bookmarks on a webpage, it is also a way to share the bookmarks with your students and your peers. That is a great start! But in the 21st Century your personal learning network can include more people than those in your building or in your classes. Welcome to Delicious! Delicious was started by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. It has more than five million users and 150 million bookmarked URLs.[1] (wikipedia)
Come along and I will guide you on a Delicious journey. A simple login to Delicious will allow you to keep your bookmarks online at your own Delicious Website. This will keep your bookmarks available anytime anywhere. (There is an option for you to add bookmarks that you do not want to share.) In order to collect your bookmarks in a meaningful way you will tag them with words that will build your bookmark library.
Here is my example, I found this site
http://memory.loc.gov/learn/start/index.html This is the site where educators may learn how to use the American Memory Collections from the Library of Congress. I want to bookmark this so I can share it with others.
When I bookmark the site, I see that 33 other people have bookmarked it, immediately I have those people help me with my search for sites about primary sources or American memory collections. In order to do that I click on the number 33, which indicates that 33 other people bookmarked that site, which displays the list of 33 people, I click the next layer down, to an individual where I find the links and categories that individual has in their bookmark library.
I chose JuliaHGibbons, thanks Julia, and found a great resource http://www.footnote.com/index.php
Next a search in Delicious for primary sources and look what I found, http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/, well actually, pcmnielsen had already done that work. Which then lead me to http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html, thanks to morgaine. Finally, the last site I searched, thanks to llyodcrew, http://www.primarysourcelearning.org/. It took me more time to write up this journey about how to use Delicious than the time it took me to research and add 4 awesome sites about primary sources for educators.
Head on over to Delicious. Start your own account.
Here is a great page to get you started from the folks at Delicious.
You will be glad you did! If you use some of the links from someone else you may add that individual to your network because all of us are smarter than one of us.
Thanks to JuliaHGibbons, morgaine, pcmnielsen and Lloydcrew for their help in creating Delicious links for this article.
Lloydcrew is actually someone I follow on Twitter and is part of my PLN, personal learning network. What's Twitter? Twitter has been recently explained by Ryan Bretag and Bob Sprankle, both writers here at TechLearning.
