ALOHA TO WIKIS!

A Wacky Wiki poem
By Heather Eby

Wikis are a collaborative and user-friendly Web 2.0 tool!
Integrated in your classroom learning, it transforms group work for the 21st century school!
Knowledge at your fingertips with Wikipedia and other educational wiki pages!
Innovative ideas and helpful wiki experts can take you through all the creative stages!

OK…so I may not be much of a poet but you’ll have to excuse me as I wrote it “wiki, wiki”! (I just love using that word!) This past week has immersed me into the wacky world of wikis and I can’t seem to stop thinking about all the different ways I can use my new wikispace site!
The internet was abound with sites and information to help anybody get started using wikis, either in the business community, personally or in education. Let’s face it, everyone has heard the term “wikis” but what EXACTLY are they and how do you use them?


WIKI PRIOR KNOWLEDGE:
As with all our latest endeavors, I began with our course guru, Will Richardson's chapter on wikis. Now here is a man excited about the possibilities of wikis and especially the phenomenon of Wikipedia. I’d also viewed Lee Lefever’s video Wikis in Plain English when this course first started so I had a basic understanding of wikis and their purpose. I’d certainly been reading a lot of wikis since the beginning of this course with all the research on the various Web 2.0 tools. My favorite example of a wiki that I’ve been using a lot is Webtools4u2use and of course the most famous wiki of all, Wikipedia that defines a wiki as "a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content...".



WIKI HOST RESEARCH:

Not being a complete stranger to wikis, but never having made my own before, I knew I had to do some research on the best wiki host to choose for making my "practice" one for this post. I started with an article I found in the School Library Journal written by Shonda Brisco entitled "What wiki is right for you?". She compared three of the main hosts used in education (and ones that I had also heard of before). The article was very helpful as far as pointing out all the pros and cons of each site. She also recommended another source for comparing different wikis called the WikiMatrix. Of course, I had to check it out! YIKES!!! I had no idea there were sooooo many options out there for creating a wiki. They had 110 different wiki hosts to compare on their "matrix". I played around with the Wiki Choice wizard on the site but found some of the questions I had to answer were a little over my head.



A WIKI TOUR:

I continued on with my search for the perfect wiki host when I came across a video presentation by Mark Wagner that he had presented at the K12 Online Conference in 2006 entitled "Wiki While You Work". I spent over an hour watching it and learned A LOT! It was actually entertaining too! (I understand he is doing an advanced wiki workshop at the K12 Online 2008. I'll have to check that one out once I've got the basics covered!) I guess you could say that that presentation plus my faith in one of my "trusted sources" such as Joyce Valenza brought me to my final choice to go with wikispaces.com (although I know she uses Pbwiki too!) Currently wikispaces is offering incentives for educators to use their site by offering their Plus package free which guarantees you an ad-free space with more flexibility in your options. I've always been a push over for a good deal so I decided to give wikispaces a go! Due to the tutorial given in the video presentation by Mark Wagner, I found creating my wikispace very easy and fun. The tricky part was deciding on which of the many "wacky wiki" ideas I had been conjuring up this past week that I wanted to begin with first.



WIKI IDEAS FOR THE CLASSROOM:

I felt a little investigation into the educational wikis of other teachers or articles pertaining to classroom ideas would help me make a good decision. A great source I found for classroom ideas was at TeachersFirst Wiki Ideas for the Classroom . There were numerous ideas for how to use wikis. Here are some that they offered that really appealed to me (and some I've made up on my own):

• a wiki "fan club" for a favorite author


• a virtual tour of your school for open house or the school website


• an encyclopedia on a special topic (ie. Explorers or Nutrition)


• a math wiki to explain problem solving strategies


• a "Be the Science Teacher" wiki that the class shared experiments they had presented


• a travel brochure of New France


• a collaborative class poetry anthology


• literature circle discussions


• progressive stories


• a book club sharing their opinions


• a yearbook of your class where each page represents a month in your room

Of course these are just wiki ideas for the classroom and collaborative projects with the students. Wikis can be used for the teachers:

• to share ideas


• study groups


• professional development opportunities


• to create class "websites" to organize their work or assignments


• to create the materials/books/outlines for study

As noted in an article by Educause Learning Initiative entitled "7 things you should know about Wikis", "The possibilities for using wikis as the platform for collaborative projects are limited only by one’s imagination and time." I couldn't agree with that statement more!

MY OWN WIKISPACE:

I wanted to make my wikispace something I could use in my teaching career right now (and "kill two birds with one stone" as they saying goes!). So I designed a wikispace for my MYRCA reading club that I started this year for the grade 6-8 students in our school. My idea was to have the students in the club sign in as members and collaborate with each other to create a page about each of the books nominated for the award. I did a lot of the "prep" work for the wiki by creating the page itself for each of the 18 books nominated and left it blank for them to "fill in" after they have finished reading the book. (This is where I see the "time" element in creating a wiki, being a factor!) I guess I should just let the space speak for itself and give you the address to visit: http://myrcamania.wikispaces.com/ .

As you can see from the wiki, the students have not yet had an opportunity to visit or log in to the wiki. It's been one of those crazy weeks at school (We had a two day in-service on Restitution on Thursday and Friday!). I also wanted to figure out exactly how I should tackle the whole privacy and informing parents issue. This lead me to yet another area of investigation in my learning about wikis and web 2.0 tools...

WIKI WARNINGS?:

In Mark Wagner's video presentation, he mentions that it's a good idea to inform the parents about your wiki projects before beginning the wiki adventure and getting the students' work out on the world wide web. Of course, he recommends all the necessary measures to keep your students' identities secure and private such as pseudonyms and not referring to your school or its location if you so desire. I thought I'd look into some sample letters for a basis to start in creating my own before the students in my club began using our wikispace. I found a quality resource on wikispaces itself entitled Wiki Issues. On the page, it has a link to a Wiki Warranty (a downloadable word document) that goes over the "rules and etiquette" of using a wiki for both the parents AND the students thus addressing one of the drawbacks of wikis. The "warranty" letter was very thorough covering the purpose of a wiki, safety concerns, terms and conditions and consequences of violation; finishing off with the parents' and students' signatures. Although I thought it was a great idea, I fear the old adage that I might be "opening a can of worms". Would I be putting more fear and concern about the use of wikis into the heads of the parents where there really is no worry in the first place? I put this idea of a letter forward to a colleague in my school who uses wikis with her class. She has never sent home a formal note about wikis to her parents but merely does a thorough job with her students in educating them on internet safety and keeps her wikis protected. I still haven't decided which avenue to take but if I do choose to send home a letter I think it would be much shorter and follow the KISS principle!

WIKI WORDS OF WISDOM:
I guess I want to sum up my thoughts and feelings about wikis by looking at their benefits and of course some of the concerns around Wikis. Again, Mark Wagner's video presentation helped to highlight many of the amazing advantages of wikis:

• engagement and motivation for our students


• how personalized and individualized they can be for our learners


• they can address the many learning styles of our 21st century students


• wikis provide a meaningful, authentic and purposeful outlet for their work


• they promote inquiry


• encourage reflection


• improving writing skills


• most importantly collaboration and working with tools of the 21st century

Looking at the flipside of wikis, there are some areas of concern:

• the source of wikis and their reliability


• inappropriate content


• vandalism (although most of this is correctible with the "history" feature of most wikis)


• cyberbullying using wikis


• copyright infringement

I think many of these areas of concern make for teachable moments in educating our students on the use of Web 2.0 tools or the internet in general! They shouldn't be avoided or blocked but rather addressed and evaluated.

After this week's "work with wikis", I can say without a doubt, that wikis will be a Web 2.0 tool that I will be using on a regular basis and can't see myself teaching without (now that I know how easy they are and what they are all about!). I will have to quote from Richardson at the end of his chapter on wikis and say that "the wiki bug has bit me"!

A VIRTUAL LIBRARY FAIRYTALE

Once upon a time in a land far, far away, there once lived a sweet, young librarian who loved books and teaching others about the wonderful world that existed behind her library doors. She woke up every morning looking forward to the hustle and bustle of her library filled with students researching using the encyclopedias, young children flipping through their favorite dog-eared nursery rhymes, teenagers scanning their favorite magazines and adults looking up their latest hobby of interest or the next bestseller! She was always busy helping her patrons and keeping up her card catalogue. Nothing else in the world made her happier than the smell of fresh new library books and the buzz of the overhead lighting mixed with the murmur of people absorbing new knowlede all around her.


Sadly, over time she slowly started to notice that the number of patrons in her library were starting to diminish. There seemed less excitement in the air. She was particulary surprised at how few students and teenagers were visiting "her" library anymore. What was happening? Where had everybody gone? More importantly, what was she going to do to make her library the happy place of learning that it once was or at least make sure that the students, teenagers and other patrons that had once frequented the library, had a way to access the information that they needed anytime and anywhere?

OK...I didn't intend to write my entire post as a fairy tale but at least I caught your attention (I hope you're not too disappointed.)! By the way, this was not a personal narrative as I am not a teacher-librarian (yet) and only made up some fictitious character, although I imagine this young librarian is probably out there somewhere if they have not yet discovered the world of the virtual library!

As a classroom teacher for the past 15 years, I've lived a bit of a sheltered life from the developments of public and school libraries and was unfamiliar with the term "virtual school library". After some primary investigations and asking the pointed question to our course instructor, "What is a virtual school library?", I discovered that it wasn't really something new to me but a term that was just new!

An obvious beginning for me was to explore various "virtual libraries" that were out there. I began with Joyce Valenza's virtual library and was welcomed with an eye-catching, graphically appealing, user-friendly site! I was in awe and had a field day clicking through her links! I couldn't help thinking, "Could I do this for my school some day? Is it possible?".



So why exactly does a TL need to make a "virtual library"?

I found a book through Amazon.com entitled, Your Library Goes Virtual by Audrey Church. Unfortunately, it wasn't realistic that I had time to read this now (or to find it at my local bookstore without ordering it) so I searched the internet for Audrey Church to see if she'd written any articles and found a conference presentation site that contained a PowerPoint she had presented in November 2005 that was available for downloading entitled, "Your Library Goes Virtual: Why?When?How?". I only wish I had been at attendance because her PowerPoint was full of terrific information. Her PowerPoint resources lead me to an article by Joan Lippincott entitled, "Net Generation Students and Libraries" that really drove home the need and main reason why virtual libraries aren't so much an option for libraries anymore but more of a necessity!

Lippincott pointed out that "students often find library-sponsored resources difficult to figure out on their own, and they are seldom exposed to or interested in formal instruction in information literacy, they prefer to use the simplistic but responsive Google. Libraries need to find ways to make their information access systems more approachable by students, integrate guides to quality resources into course pages, and find ways to increase their presence in general Web search engines."

Joyce Valenza reinforced this same point in her article, Find Your Path! Making Research Easy with Virtual Libraries. "If students are going to be effective seekers and users of information, they need two types of guidance: information skills critical for the twenty-first century, and customized, appropriate, and well-designed online learning environments. Virtual libraries do the job on both fronts."

With such excellent "arguments", the role of the virtual library seems absolutely essential to me for any viable and up-to-date twenty-first century library (school or public) to meet the needs of today's "patrons" (students or the general public)!



So what do these virtual libraries need to include in order to be most effective?

I guess it's obvious that different types of libraries will need to address the type of "clientele" that they serve most frequently. When "checking out" the various virtual school libraries that exist for either elementary, high school, university or a city's public library, they all have basic elements in common but also contain other more specific tools that aid their particular users. Joyce Valenza has been compiling a list of some common features in school library websites in her wikispace. Here are some of the common features she has found in her study:

-online catalogs OPAC

-subscription databases

-web references

-links to news sources

-pathfinders

-links to Web search tools

Valenza includes a few others in her article, "Find your Path!" :

-mental maps and navigational aids "virtual libraries let students envision the scope of their resource choices by helping them create mental maps for the information landscape and by using physical library metaphors to organize Web resources."

-documentation advice

-handouts, lessons and activities

-reading motivation (This is one of my favorites...especially for the middle school library!)

-"ask-a-librarian" type reference service

-parents' page

-library events

Among these features, the term "pathfinders" was new to me also! Valenza describes a pathfinder as "a web-based tool customized to meet the needs of a particular group of students for a particular assignment, linking students to the specific resources recommended by their teachers and librarians." Now that's something I could see myself wanting to explore in my own classroom. I'd love to be able to work with my TL to create one for my students on a particular unit of study so they would learn that there is more out there than Google and AskJeeves!



Where can I find some great virtual libraries to model and learn from?

After being absolutely amazed by Joyce Valenza's virtual library, I wanted to see what was a little bit closer to home, so I began exploring our school division's various websites in search of "virtual school libraries".

Here are a few worth sharing, that really caught my eye as great examples:

-Bairdmore School Library
-Van Wallegham School Library Wiki (not as glamourous but good information)
-Fort Richmond Collegiate Library Wiki
- Linden Meadows School "Techtalk" blog (This is actually one of my school's blog pages that is currently inactive due to staffing changes but is a great start towards becoming a type of virtual library.)

Some other virtual libraries I spent time perusing were:

- Walter Reed Middle School Library
-Greece Athena School - this had a great link to the Big 6
-Kentucky Virtual Library - this site had a great research link for kids "How to do Research"
-Menasha Public Library - of course I was directed to this virtual library through my KidLit blog -Tomlinson Middle School - I loved all the resources available for teachers AND students on this library site. The librarian seems to be very involved in everything going on in the school (as a great librarian should be!) I bookmarked the Google Earth link as I'm interested in learning more about how to use this in my own classroom!
John Newbery Elementary - This was a terrific site with a great example of Pathfinders! It was colorful and attractive for the younger learner (and me)!

What are the pros and cons of virtual libraries?

The "pros" seem pretty obvious to me:
-reference access 24/7
-helping our students in finding authentic, appropriate information off the web
-making the library "user-friendly" and inviting for the "non-reader" types
-helping teachers to access professional development material and resources for their students
-keeping up with our digital learners on their terms
and much, much more!

It's hard to believe that there may be any "cons" to virtual libraries. Here are a few things to consider:
-keeping all websites and reference links current
-updating it regularly
-keeping it fresh and fun to visit
-not getting an audience after all the hard work of putting it together
To me, these "cons" don't seem that difficult to surmount! With the extra work that might come from the updating, the time will return to you two-fold in the time saved pulling these materials from the shelf or helping sift through the same material, year after year.
As for attracting an "audience", it's all about promotion and regular referrals to your virtual library on an LCD projector or Smartboard everytime a class enters your library!

I am totally sold on the idea and concept of virtual libraries and can't wait to have the opportunity to create one of my own someday! In the words of Joyce Valenza ,"If you build it, they will learn!"


Campbell / from the UK library journal "Ariadne"

(found on library_mistress' photostream on Flickr)

Hopefully today's teacher-librarians will become more comfortable with technology, making virtual libraries part of their library world and won't need to be using "white-out" on their computer screens like Miss Faversham!

MY PODCAST PERFORMANCE!!

This podcast is a tour of my classroom blog! It might make more sense to hear it as you check out my "other" blog.

My Recipe for PODCASTING CON POLLO!

(I guess you could say I felt like this chicken...staring blankly at the computer wondering where to begin on my quest for learning about podcasts this week or perhaps this is what PODCASTING CON POLLO looks like!)



Podcasting con pollo is a delicious (wrong word...it's a new tool this week so let's try a different adjective)...I've been experimenting in the kitchen (at the computer) with this scrumptious (yes, that's better!) recipe for PODCASTING CON POLLO! If you're unfamiliar with the term "con pollo", it means "with chicken"; which is how I would describe my reluctance and fear to learn about podcasting this past week!


So here it is (my recipe for ) PODCASTING CON POLLO!



Ingredients needed:

• articles about Podcasting from which to learn



• supportive and knowledgeable colleague



• recording microphone headset (USB plug worked best)



• computer



• Audacity open-source program



• Lame MP3 encoder



• Divshare.com



• Personal and professional blogs
  

and finally..

• A willing participant (me!) to create their first podcast!

Step 1: Begin your reading of articles and books about podcasting before attempting one on your own. It's important to understand exactly what a podcast is before beginning the process of making this recipe.

In an article by Esther Kreider Eash entitled Podcasting 101 for K-12 Librarians, she defines it simply as "a digital audio file that's created, shared and heard". According to this same article, The New Oxford American Dictionary chose "podcast" as its 2005 Word of the Year. If this word has been so prevelant in society since 2005, it was definitely time for me to be "sinking my teeth" into this new technology and finding out how this could benefit me and my students.

Step 2: In order to prepare a proper "Podcast con Pollo" it is necessary to become familiar with podcasts that have already been created and used in an educational setting so you will know how your final product should turn out!

Will Richardson, Esther Kreider Eash and Wesley Freyer all recommended "Radio Willoweb" and Bob Sprankle's podcasts as excellent examples of podcasts in action! It was amazing to listen to students sharing their learning so globally, you just new they were having fun while they were creating, thinking and producing their work! I also wanted to figure out how to access the recommended podcasts by Joanne in her trailfire and discussion response but by using itunes as the source rather than just clicking the links. It was fairly easy for me to do this as both my husband and I each have our own ipod Nanos and access itunes frequently (but only for music....not anymore!) As pointed out so clearly in her article, Podcasting 101, is that podcasting provides a unique, affordable and diverse opportunity for professional development by listening to other educators share their knowledge and expertise through podcasts. The idea of being able to subscribe to a favorite podcast and be able to listen to it whenever and wherever you want is a huge bonus! I'm subscribing to Women of Web 2.0 and Bob Sprankle's Seedlings podcasts. I'm curious to see how faithful I am to taking the time to listen and learn using this method (I think I'll try Joanne's workout idea!)

Step 3: Now take the next ingredient in your recipe, a supportive and knowledgeable colleague, and beg her to spend some time with you as you learn this new and exciting tool!

A wonderful friend and "technogeek" as she likes to call herself, sat down with me and explained the process she has used with her students in the past when creating a podcast. It was a relief to be "preparing" my podcast (con pollo) with someone who knew their way around the kinks that can befall someone when tinkering with downloading software in a school division with so many blocks and "requests for service" when we want to add new software to our computers (even if they are free!).

Step 4: Take the last 6 ingredients in your recipe and mix them slowly and methodically together, being patient with the final ingredient to ensure it is well rehearsed and "ripe" before adding to the mixture.

Before I could begin recording, I needed an idea. I wanted something that I could share with my students as well so they could see what "learning" I am doing this year too! Since they visit our blog every week and we had just started it up. I thought it would be fun to create an "online tour" of our classroom blog. I'd read somewhere (so many articles I've been reading I sometimes forget where I find the information) that it was better not to read from a perfectly written script otherwise it sounds too rehearsed or monotone so I just wrote down some key points I wanted to make and "winged" the rest!

With my "sketched out" script, I downloaded Audacity as suggested by Will Richardson (and my colleague) and plugged in a headset (from the school's computer lab) into the USB outlet. I tested it out a few times to ensure it was working and began broadcasting my "tour". I must admit it was a bit weird talking to myself in an empty room but I was impressed with the final results. I would LOVE to have played with the Garageband features on our school's Macs to add the flair of a music introduction or background but due to time and my inexperience with podcasting (and using Macs), I decided to keep it simple and try that feature out the next time!

In order to "share" my podcast with you, I needed to select a site that could upload my recording and share it through my blog. Through word of mouth at our school, Divshare had come highly recommended for its ease of use and because the school division had not blocked it (yet!).

Before I could upload it, I had an extra step to take through an MP3 encoding site called lame. I'm not quite sure why this was required (this is the part of computers that baffles me!) but we needed to do this in order to make it an MP3 audiofile before Divshare would accept it. After that, using Divshare was so easy! Once it was uploaded to Divshare I simply copied the html code and pasted it into my blogger posting page under the html tab and VOILA!! My first podcast!

Step 5: With your Podcast Con Pollo finally prepared, it is important to use this recipe again and again with others (your students or colleagues) to perfect it, enhance it and reap the benefits of its unique "flavors"!

What surprised me the most about this Web 2.0 tool was all the ways it could be used in the classroom, not unlike photosharing and videosharing, except with the safety and security for parents that their child's identity would remain private but their voice and ideas could be heard!

In Podcasting 101 for K-12 Librarians, the uses of podcasts were endless. Here are just a few that I could see myself using some day:

- on a field trip using an MP3 player to document observations and notes

- conducting oral history interviews

-storytelling

-book reviews

-readers theater dramatizations

-readings or personal responses to novel studies or literature circles.

-on-demand tutorials

-sharing school news as a radio broadcast

-poetry readings

Another amazing site I found that shares an abundance of ideas for podcasting in the classroom and had links that would explain exactly how to integrate those ideas in a more step-by-step manner, it was called (ironically) Ideas for Podcasting in the Classroom.

What really drove home the benefits of podcasting for me, was a comment made by Eash that I hadn't even thought of but I deal with everyday in my classroom as I attempt to differentiate my instruction for the many needs and various types of learners. "The podcast is a viable alternative for delivering research content or lessons to students who need remedial or extended support. Auditory learners particularly benefit when podcasts are incorporated into the teaching model..."

Another terrific article I read that inspired me even more to be incorporating this tool into my teaching was written by Wesley Fryer entitled Classroom Audio Podcasting. Some of the benefits he highlighted were:

-"Podcasting is cheap!" With budget cuts and other areas of education needing funding, technology doesn't usually come cheap but podcasting only requires the use of a microphone and a computer.

-It invites an audience for the students from around the world as well as creating a "window into the classroom" for parents and community members to understand what is going on inside our classrooms.

-"It encourages students to communicate without all the bells and whistles that other types of multimedia modalities employ (eg. slide transitions, lighting, props, etc.)...helping students to focus more on the message's content and effective delivery."

- "Podcasts are interactive, creative and most of all FUN!"

To finish off my analogy of podcasting to a recipe (a different twist on this week's blog posting!), my suggested serving size and recommendation would be that Podcasting con pollo is for EVERYONE and that someday I hope to serve my Podcasting recipe con fiducia (with confidence)!

"To Furl or not to Furl? That is the question!"

And what a loaded question it has been for me this past week! The term “to furl” is actually a sailing term that describes the action of rolling/folding up a sail using a system of pulleys and ropes to make life easier for a sailor, rather than doing it manually (on your hands and knees and stuffing it into a bag!) I guess the term is not far off in its comparison to social bookmarking as we ‘FURL’ our favorite sites in an easier manner using a system of tags/keywords instead of stuffing them into folders on one computer!! (As a sailor, I just had to throw that analogy in there!)

However, that being said, not unlike all the other tools we have been investigating in this course, social bookmarking was an even newer one for me. The safest and most reliable place to start my learning was with Will Richardson’s chapter on The Social Web in his book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other powerful web tools for the classroom. As I was reading his book, I was once again convinced that FURL must be the way to go with social bookmarking.

Setting up my Furl account was fairly easy! I loved Will’s screen prints in his book. (It helps out the visual learner in me!) It all seemed to make sense to me…I could have private sites or public sites, I can share with certain subscribers or to everyone, I categorize my sites by keywords (or tags), I can rate the sites and even write comments about it. Everything was going “tickatyboo” for me until I got frustrated by how long it took my computer to save a new site on Furl??? (I still can’t explain that one!) and by all the extra features that bookmarking a site with Furl involves.

So I began finding articles that reviewed or discussed Furl and found an informative piece written by Jim Wenzloff entitled, Furl, Furled, Furling. Here was another educator “sold” on Furl.net with a step-by-step guide to using Furl. He had a lot of great suggestions for using it in the school setting such as:

1. Web sites for student research or projects

2. Book recommendations

3. Professional research

4. List of books you would like to read

5. Placing web links on your school web page

6. Students can find resources at home and access them at school and vice versa

7. Share what you are reading on the web or view what your peers are reading on the web

8. Web site collections by school topic

I still wasn’t 100% convinced that Furl was the way to go without giving del.icio.us a try, the other recommended social bookmarking site. I was even more influenced after reading a few articles in Education World. Doug Johnson’s article entitled, It’s delightful; it’s del.icio.us! explained the bonus of being able to create more than one account so you could set up different accounts for different classes you teach, or different subject areas and using special tag codes created for your students.

I also liked the tag cloud features that deli.icio.us had to offer; another great visual for those of us who need a more graphic system of organizing. The del.icio.us page itself seemed easier for me to interpret, my computer saved the sites faster through del.icio.us (added bonus!) and my igoogle page is able to access my personal del.icio.us account whereas I couldn’t seem to get my bookmarks from FURL to log onto it. As you can see from my del.icio.us tag cloud on the sidebar of my blog, I eventually went with del.icio.us!

I still have some organizing and tagging of bookmarks to do since I imported all the FAVORITES from our toolbar. My biggest word in the cloud is bookmarks because that is the word that del.icio.us tags onto a site that hasn’t been properly tagged or edited yet.

I guess my investigation into social bookmarking seems a bit two-sided with only Furl and del.icio.us but I did read an article by Lorrie Jackson at Education World entitled Sites to see, Social Bookmarking that mentioned Scuttle and Buddymarks as other possible choices, especially for use in the schools as they are monitored for appropriate sites or can be administered through the schools’ own server.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is a great tool for myself personally managing recipe sites, vacation spots, my children’s favorite online game sites and other sites of personal interest as well as educational sites for great lessons and tips. I’m still a little overwhelmed with the work it will take me to tag all my existing sites but I know it will work out in the end. I’m excited at the idea of sharing socially and getting connected to sites discovered by fellow educators, librarians, even working moms with yummy 20 minute recipes!

As for the possibilities in my teaching or school, I mentioned a few above but here are a few I could really see myself using…

-Collecting sites for students in preparation of research projects (particularly for those at the younger grades)
-Sharing great sites amongst my fellow teachers
-Creating collections of resources for different subject areas
-Sharing with other teachers within study groups for professional development
-Creating a tag cloud of educational sites for my students on our class blog page
-Accessing my favorite sites that I found at home…at school!
-I’m sure more will “crop up” along the way!

To look at this phenomenon of social bookmarking more critically, I couldn’t help feeling a bit overwhelmed at the idea of creating another account and setting up yet another system of “organization”. Frankly, I thought I was doing really well with my Google Reader, my igoogle page, my list of Favorites and of course my blog of interesting links. Even after learning all the many benefits of social bookmarking, I was still leary of what Will Richardson refers to as “information overload” in his blog posting Tags vs. Trusted Sources.

Will I get bogged down with more websites and information than I really need? When do I start limiting it to just the places I know and trust?
Is it possible to get too much information and reach “total brain collapse” (Will’s words not mine!)?
Isn’t this just another search engine under the glorified name of “social networking” and Web 2.0?

I think Richardson says it best when he states “We are all going to find our own unique solutions. Bottom line is balancing the desire for relevant information about topics that you are interested in with the time you have to put into creating systems to bring that information to you.” I think in the end, the time invested in tagging and organizing sites WILL be worth the benefits I will reap in new information for my students and staying on top of my own personal “game”! I am very interested to see how consistent and faithful I will be to this new system of organization over the next few months and to further investigate all the potential that social bookmarking (specifically del.icio.us) has to offer!