Week 6 Reflections

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I think it's fair to say many of the teachers in this course are finding Delicious a very useful partner for resource building.  The term partner in this case has a lot more depth too as it really does enable you to partner up with your global peers - even though they may never know it.  It's all about creating value - when you tag a site as being useful to your needs you are in effect voting and others will benefit.  And vice versa - when thousands of professionals in your field do the same thing, the resources are in effect being selected and vetted for your consideration and benefit.  This really is a profound and meaningful display of the power of what is coming to be called crowd-sourcing.

This post from Amy sums up the immediate benefits of Delicious succinctly.  To comment on her post, please visit her blog, White Site.

"After stumbling through the website, I finally got my Delicious account set up! I typed in several topics we have been studying in class and was shocked by the amount of information that was quickly returned! Some were things that I am already using in class but took quite some time to collect. This is definitely a new skill that I will be putting to good use.

I am currently spending heaps of time searching the internet for everything I use in class. I then save the websites to me favorites list. I understand that this is clunky and not the best way of going about things.

I look forward to searching around on Delicious more to see what all it has to offer."

And here's one from Russ's Blog

Finding and Using Online Resources

I usually use online resources which facilitates online collaboration and information-gathering. Most of the resources I use come from the ISB Library Resources page, and after personally testing those resources, I adapt the most useful ones to my lesson plans.

I taught one unit wherein I constrained teams of students to finding information around a subject using nothing more than their Del.icio.us accounts. They were able to find resources and tag them as their own. Other students were able to see their peers using resources and commenting on the usefulness of them. This saved time in doing research, and students had fun commenting on the validity of each website or database found through Del.icio.us.

I also use National Science Foundation and National Science Teachers Association websites for finding Science-based resources. The resources advertised are suggestions made by other educators and professionals.