Thursday November 6, 2014

Post #2:

I continued my work tonight, and explored social bookmarking. I’ve had some prior experience using online bookmark managers in the past, which I supposed could be loosely termed “social bookmarking” sites. However I never used any of the sites mentioned in this course. I had heard of Delicious before, but never had any reason to try it. I’m glad I did. It is going to take some time to transfer all the many bookmarks from all the many different areas of my life into my Delicious account. I’m a bit “anal” and I think I’d prefer to do it manually so I can customize the tags myself one by one. Plus, this will give me the opportunity to do some weeding.  However, in the long run, I think this tool is going to be so helpful and useful. Unfortunately, I was having an issue with Google Chrome tonight, in that I was unable to install the app and the extension. I’m hoping when I shut down the computer tonight and restart tomorrow, it will work. One of the benefits of Chrome, though, if it doesn’t work from my computer at home, it will more than likely work from another computer!

At work, the way our network is configured, teachers (and students) are unable to save favorites. Anything saved to the hard drive of the computer (including favorites) are wiped out when you log off or shut down. It is very frustrating. Having a site such as Delicious will be very useful for teachers and I’m looking forward to sharing. As the media specialist, I’m the only person who uses my computer, and I have different technology needs, therefore I’ve been assigned a more administrative log in. I am one of the few lucky ones with access to my desktop at work, and am able to save to the hard drive, save favorites, and other more administrative functions on our network.

After exploring Delicious, I went on to learn about the other sites. I went in to explore EduClipper. I’ve been using a site that sounded very close to it, called Symbaloo. Symbaloo is also a social bookmarking site, where you create boards with tiles, and boards can be shared. It, also, is visual and very user friendly for the students in the elementary school to use. After watching a few tutorials on EduClipper, I have to say I still find Symbaloo easier to use. I haven’t quite figured out how to use the clipper tool yet. However, I’m going to keep at it. Primarily, I’m going to keep trying because there is one thing that EduClipper can do that Symbaloo cannot. With EduClipper, you can link to documents. Symbaloo still only allows you to link to websites. So I’ll keep you posted on my EduClipper progress! I’ve turned a few of my teachers on to Symbaloo. Hopefully once I’ve worked out the kinks with EduClipper, I’ll get them on board with that site too!

I did some research into adding a link roll from Delicious onto my blog. Unfortunately that is a function that has been removed from Delicious. However, here is the link to my Delicious site so far: https://delicious.com/ngridley. 

For my elementary school students, examples of how I would use social bookmarking sites include the following:

·       creating lists of sites for classroom or grade level use

·       assisting teachers with the same as above, or assisting them with creating lists of sites for helping students with homework

·       creating a bank of safe sites for students to use when researching for a particular topic

·       for upper grades, using the social bookmarking site to teach website evaluation, and how to store their own bookmarks