Who would of thought the a bookmarking network would become so powerful. Delicious to create a digital profile as Will Richardson and Michelle Martin blog about. Michelle and Will both continue to expand on these ideas. On a basic level Delicious is just a simple and effective way to organise your bookmarks but if used effectively it offers so much more.

It is searchable so it is much more useful for teachers within the school environment. Teachers can create networks with each other to share sites for professional reading and common interests. It can be used to keep track of sites that are essential for Inquiry units especially if tagged consistently.  Our school works on their Inquiry units on a two year cycle so in two years time we will be able to search on the relevant tag and have quick access to the sites we referenced previously. It is then just a matter of deleting or adding to the favourites that we had.

The networking with respected colleagues is an opportunity to follow what they are reading. Annotating carefully for yourself and colleagues when you choose a bookmark helps those who follow you decide if the bookmark is relevant or important to them.

Bookmarking your own writing and work on the web is a way to take control of your Digital Footprint or Digital image. Use a tag indicates this part of your portfolio.

Just as an addon Similicio.us will search and find bookmarks that are similar to each other.

I am surprised at just how engaged year 4 students are with the games unit we are doing in Scratch. Students have to make a game where they learn about healthy eating and teach the players of their game something about healthy eating. They are so keen to learn that we have to hunt them out at the end of the class.This is certainly a winner with the boys but the girls are also showing a lot of interest.

I think the key is to not just get caught up in the mechanics of programming Scratch but include the learning about the content to make their games more interesting and valuable.

Learning to use some specialised search engines is probably like teaching yourself the keystroke shortcuts for your favourite functions.
The EdTech crew mentioned the PDF search engine that would be the most direct way to find “how to” documents. (Or apparently an advanced search on Google)
Similicio.us is a search engine that finds sites that are similar to or have the same Delicious tags as another site. Apart from the obvious uses the Smart Board Podcast people quite cleverly suggested that this would be an excellent resource for students in developing critical literacy. By looking for similar sites the students would be able compare information from different sources and perspectives. The example given was to search for similar news sites to compare a news item. An item from CNN could be compared to the same event from BBC NEWS, The New York Times, Wired News and The Washington Post etc.  I have added Similico.us to my Firefox tool bar so I won’t forget to try it out.

Resource: 50 great search engines every librarian should know about

DELICIOUS

I’ve started a Delicious account for my school this week and I have been busy collecting links to the sites that have been scattered over numerous documents so that they sit in one place. The advantage with Delicious over our school intranet is:

• that the tags will make it easy for teachers to find sites that are relevant to the inquiry units of study,
• and in two years time when the units are being rewritten the links are in one place and can be easily revaluated
• teachers can add links easily from home or school to one central position with the appropriate tag
• using Delicious tags at school will help teachers move forward in understanding Web 2.0 tool.

Of course the next thing to do is PD with the staff!