Showing posts with label bookmarks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bookmarks. Show all posts

Friday, December 10, 2010

The 12 days of Techmas - Day 1: Symbaloo

Over the course of the next 12 days I will be sharing 12 different websites/services that are handy for the classroom. I know there are still 15 days until Christmas, but I'm sure no one will be reading this blog in the 3 days leading up to the big day.




Today's website is called Symbaloo. Symbaloo is a site where you can store your bookmarks visually. After creating an account, you can customize your webmixes (fancy word for bookmark) with little icons that represent your pages. When adding new bookmarks, you have the option of searching through their database for bookmarks created by other users, potentially saving you some time. If you cannot find what you're looking for or want a more specific page, you can create your own. You simply need to plug in the URL and upload an icon for your bookmark (you can choose from some clipart alternately).


You can also customize the number of webmixes on display and move them around. One tip is to group webmixes into content or subject areas (see picture below), a handy way to organize your work.



Not only would this be a great place for you to organize your bookmarks, students could create their own accounts as well. They could even use Symbaloo as a method for keeping track of their sources when finding information. One quick click and they're back to the page they used before.


If you're really keen, for a small fee you can get a custom URL. This would mean that students in your classes could simply go to your Symbaloo page for all of the weblinks they need. Doing this may be of benefit for young students and students that are just acquiring English, as it would eliminate the need for reading and typing.


TOMORROW: Livebinder - Who needs USB sticks anymore?

Monday, May 24, 2010

Delicious? Yes it is.

Simply put, social bookmarking is a way for people to share their internet links with others. Not so simply put, social bookmarking is a method for people to share, search, organize and manage not only their bookmarks, but the bookmarks of colleagues or members of their PLN.
Delicious is probably the most famous social bookmarking site and it is the one I will profile today. If you haven't heard of delicious, sign up for an account NOW!

On a basic level, Delicious is great for saving your own personal bookmarks. You can import bookmarks you've already saved on your computer to your delicious account easily.You can also add a handy delicious tool to your browser that will enable you to save websites to your delicious account with one click (I would highly recommend this). You have the option to keep your bookmarks private or public so that everyone can find the sites you feel are valuable.

One important thing to understand when bookmarking sites on delicious are tags. Tags are the most essential aspect of delicious as they will help you organize and search through your bookmarks. When adding a website to your delicious account, delicious will actually provide you with some suggested tags for that page based on words others have used to categorize that website. For an example, here is a link to my delicious account with all of the websites I have tagged as Web 2.0: http://delicious/andy.cunningham/web2.0. You can further refine your search by combining two or more tags: http://delicious.com/andy.cunningham/web2.0+presentation.

As I said, social bookmarking can be a very effective tool for a PLN. Not only can you direct people to your public delicious page you can also follow other people to see which sites they have identified as being important. Simply search for a user and add them to your network. You can browse through your Network's delicious bookmarks and keep up to date with new sites they've added. This could be very effective for a PLC group as people could simply add sites to their delicious account for others in the group to search through.

For those of you who would prefer this transcript in video, watch this: