del.icio.us

Updated: June 12, 2019:  Del.icio.us is no more.  See this article for more information or this one for alternatives to Del.icio.us!  Happy Bookmarking!

Educational technology has been more of an avocation for me over the past few years, than a vocation. But I have recently been asked to teach a technology class at the university. We are several weeks into the semester and I have been both enjoying my students and enjoying playing with the technology that is available to us.

This brings me to the Social Bookmarking site, del.icio.us. Here you can bookmark and tag websites, blogs, and more. You can mark them to share them with friends or keep them private. It's great for its social benefits, but even more wonderful for its research benefits. While bookmarking and tagging a website about misconceptions in earth science, I noted that six other people had bookmarked the same page. I hopped on over to their bookmarks, sorted by misconceptions and viola! I found several more useful sites on misconceptions that I might not have found on my own using Google (just due to the sheer number of hits Google generates).

Of course, I think about how this tool would have been useful to me as a third grade teacher. Had I shared my bookmarks with my team members and vice versa, we'd have had an amazing amount of resources at our fingertips. Of course, when I was teaching third grade the Internet was still in diapers and we didn't even have Internet access in our classrooms, let alone computers!

If you're curious about del.icio.us, visit their site. You can access my bookmarks here or by simply typing http://del.icio.us/katleslie into your browser. If you begin using or have used social bookmarking sites in the past, feel free to comment here about your experiences.