Social Bookmarking; Who Knew???

Yesterday, I began the day with a little bit of anxiety. What if I am so inept that I just can't pull off some of this teaching with technology? After all, I have been using paper and pencil since I've been a student, and it all turned out just fine.

What a pleasant surprise to be able to work slowly with direction from our instructor. I felt successful and encouraged, not only by Martha, but by my classmates!

The assignment was to "set something up, using a web based tool."

Mardi and I are team-mates who have been teaching second grade together for 10 years. It was fantastic to be able to discuss the most helpful tool for the two of us to share to enhance and support our classroom teaching.

We selected Social Bookmarking.

Social Bookmarking, we felt would first help us gather and remember favorite websites that we like to visit for professional resources. Also, we realized that we could allow our students and parents to access this site to gain practice in reading, writing, math, etc. And THEN, we thought that we could list favorite and appropriate research sites for our students' "Ocean Animal Research Project". 

First we visited Delicious.com. It looked like a good place to start. 

Next, was the problem of setting up our page, but Delicious "talked us through it" so to speak. The glitch for me was to drag an icon up onto the toolbar!!!! And eventually Mardi and I found an instruction on how to do that.

We set up usernames. Next we selected "Stacks" or categories for our websites that we would recommend to students/parents/colleagues. 

Our stacks include Professional Resources, Reading, Writing, Handwriting (yes handwriting....this is a resource for parents w/ our new handwriting program starting this school year), Math, Careers, and Research. Our Professional Resources stack has locked sites from the parents and students. These are for our use only.

We then began to look up our favorite websites, and saving them under the stacks. The "Save on Delicious" Icon that is saved on our toolbars are super fantastic!

Now if we find a site that we like, we just click onto that icon and viola, it is added to Delicious. com. A page pops us and allows us to save it under a stack. If we don't have a stack that describes the site, one can be created easily on the spot.

We can also tag our sites so that other educators like ourselves, who are looking for appropriate web resources, can access them.

When selecting websites, we can make them public or private, and as I mentioned before, our Professional Resources are private.

This was so easy to do, especially working with Mardi. I am excited to share Social Bookmarking with our third team-mate and any other teacher at our school who would like to implement this tool in his/her classroom.

Social Bookmarking. Who knew? Lots of people, BUT, now I know too!!!!!