Thing #11- Week5 Award Winners

Well, I looked at the finals short list and chose Web Dev Yahoo! Pipes, but quickly discovered that it was way more techy then I was looking for! Then I looked at the recipe category and was quite disappointed with the winners. I like the idea of video taping making a recipe and sharing that! I have found some of those on Utube also.

So I finally settled on

Bookmarking

Del.icio.us

StumbleUpon

Furl

I took a few minutes to look at StumbleUpon and Furl, and not sure that I would use either. StumbleUpon may be fun as they say on the site for the "next time you want to wander the web.." but I don't wander much. and Furl may be fine, but our district has cleared Del.icio.us on our fire wall so that's what I need to spend time on learning more about.

I have put a TAG button on my browser page so if I'm on a site that I want on Del.icio.us I just click on the button and a pop-up window allows me to add a description and tags. Very handy. So I do that. Then I have my browser (Firefox ) bookmarks set to ask me if I want to also add to delicious. So I do that too.

I'm beginning to think that this is a bit silly- at least I find it annoying to do both. Still I seem to have a notion that I don't want everything on Del.icio.us. Why not I ask myself. We'll see after I spend some time checking it out if I learn anything new.

I think I'll read through some of our other posts from this Thing to see what other people tried. Del.icio.us is quite simple... there is a list of your links and lists of links from the rest of the Del.icio.us community. I did choose the whole blog link and found some interesting sites.

There is a very active Classroom 2.o site where I read through a great conversation thread on the issue of choosing between a blog or a wiki! Yes, there are many replies with links to classroom examples. Seems like a great site to keep track of.

So, one feature of Del.icio.us is to use the tags to look for other resources on the same topic.

Another use of Del.icio.us that I have read about is for teachers to assign a tag for a class say CMSalgebra1 that would be unique and all of the students in this class could assign this tag if they found good algebra resources.

I discovered that in order have people share their bookmarks with you you have to have your network symbol setup, then you belong to a network of people to share with... Also you can have a list of your bookmarks on your website or blog, and a tag cloud... I love tag clouds!

So I did discover some new things!

Since I'm not really a classroom teacher I'm not going to join the Classroom 2.0 ning, but will recommend to teachers! Instead I will join the teacher-librarian ning and see where that goes. I'm not totally sold on nings. Just not enough time. Also not open in our district.

Finally as for the travel game... I stink! It told me so! My map skills are BAD- but sure would be a fun game for students to play... teachers could even keep a scoreboard. How do you get it to stop! I got to level for and 153 points. oh well!