Web.a.licio.us

Ok, I know this has been around for a while but I finally created a del.icio.us account and I’m hooked. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this Web 2.0 feature it’s a place to store your bookmarks remotely. This has a number of benefits for educators. “What’s he on about?”, I’ll explain. While surfing the net, you stumble on a site that you think might be of use, either to yourself, your class or even other teachers, and bookmark it. Now normally you would add the site’s address (the URL) to the bookmark/favourites folder in your web browser but this has limitations. That URL is now only accessible from the computer you were on at the time, not very practical if you use multiple computers to access the net, and it’s not accessible for others either. Del.icio.us provides a solution.

Instead of, or as well as, bookmarking a site in your web browser, add the site to your del.icio.us account. Now that bookmark is available to you no matter which computer you access the net from. I’ll be extremely honest here, when I was first introduced to de.licio.us a while ago I was quite indifferent to it. It fell smack into the “Very nice, but when would I use that?” category. I’d even been told that it was great for educators. How? Would somebody please give me an example of how this feature was going to be of use to me as an educator? Then the penny (or cent) dropped.

We waste a lot of time getting students to research the web for assignments, and as we all know, there is a lot of mis-information out there, so instead of getting students to waste entire sessions searching invalid sites, set up a del.icio.us account for your subject area at your school. Name it something like music@yourschool or yourschooldrama so it’s easy to find by others and then add sites that you believe are appropriate and valid for the assignment. You can even bundle links according to their tags thereby grouping links for different tasks.

Now you could allow students to add further links to the account if you like, however, you would lose the ability to moderate the quality of the links. There are two ways to allow students to contribute to this collaborative research. The first is to simply encourage them to email you the link and you post it to the account if you feel it’s valid (of course provide an explanation if it isn’t). The second is to utilise the networking feature of del.icio.us. Encourage students to create their own accounts and include the school account in their network, you do likewise. You now have a forum for the collective research to be shared amongst the class with the initial account you set up acting as the “official” account. You can browse the links added by students and give the decent ones the seal of approval by adding them to the main account. Collaboration with some regulation, sounds like heaven.