Friday, March 27, 2009

Thing 11. Tagging and Del.icio.us

After playing so much with Flickr and doing the tagging, I felt I had already learned about tagging but as always, there was more to learn! I just added some tags to my Flickr blog. I really hadn't paid too much attention to the labels option at the bottom.



Now the Del.icio.us site really sounds appealing for me since I do some of my work at home on a Windows machine, a lot of my work in my office at school and then again, I have the teacher workstation in the lab and the computer that runs my SMART Board. Sometimes I have found a cool web site and then had to try to find it again since I was on another computer. I think I'm going to like this!

O.K. Now I've created my own Del.icio.us account. I've added all my bookmarks from home. Now I just need to get all the ones from school. I have always had my bookmarks in folders so I don't have to look through them all so the tagging thing is new to me. I kept on looking for how to organize them but I guess if I tag them well, that will do it. I did the easy import - big mistake because I ended up getting a whole bunch of my family's bookmarks as well and had to delete a whole bunch from my Del.icio.us account.

#10 Wikis

The Wiki is a great tool to have kids share. As I was reading the article, I was trying to see how the application could be used for staff as well. I went to the 23 Things on a Stick Wiki but had to request access so I'm waiting to hear back so that I can edit as well. The PB Wiki sounds like the way to go - easy and free! I really appreciate the video clip. I am such a visual learner that it really helps to see some visual and I hope to use that clip with my students yet this year when we're talking about Wikis! I also found out that Wiki is a Hawaiian word for "fast".

#9 On-line Collaboration Tools

I am finally getting to the Zoho documents. I emailed to be invited to edit the Declaration of Independence during winter break and after receiving word that I was invited to edit, I left this whole project while teaching took precedence. Don't you hate when that happens? Anyway, it's spring break right now and I'm finally getting back to the process. I love the idea of having multiple kids working collaboratively on a document. I think this has direct implications for teaching even at the elementary level. We are exploring Open Office for our elementary and also have had Google Docs mentioned so Zoho was another cool option to hear about. The actual editing posed some problems as I didn't get in to edit. I could see the document and the link from the email took me directly there but . . . couldn't change anything. I saw how to sign up but thought from the outline that I didn't need to sign in if I was invited. Anyway, I understand the concepts of both and I think this would be a really cool way of helping kids edit.