Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts (ch 6) Reflection

Social bookmarking is definitely a good idea and a good way to have access to a lot of information in one place.  This chapter talked about Twitter and sites like Delicious, which would both be good tools to use in a classroom.  Personally I don’t really understand Twitter and don’t really like the idea of using it, especially for personal reasons.  Academically it could be a useful tool because you can post questions for others to see and get a wide range of answers from anyone who is ‘following’ you.  I think that using a blog is just as easy and you can get the same results because people can comment on your blog about what you have written.  At some point teachers have to choose what technology they will use and which technology they won’t because I feel if you use it all, it will become quite overwhelming.  Sites like Delicious or Diigo on the other hand I think are very beneficial for teachers and students.  Delicious or Diigo allow you to keep track of the websites that you find very beneficial when doing research on certain topics.  Instead of keeping all these websites in the favorite area on your computer, you can create your own website so you can have access to them at all times.  This way when you are at school or work and need to find a website you can’t remember the name of, you can log on to your Delicious account and find it quite easily.  If you just had the website saved in your favorites at home, you would have no way to access it and wouldn’t be able to get the information you needed.  A website like Delicious is something I would have my students start making at the beginning of the school year so that by the end they would have a really good resource to use in the future.  I would also give them access to each other’s accounts so they could see what their fellow classmates were researching or found interesting.  This would be a good way to get to know your students and what they enjoy to do or what they are interested about learning.  These accounts are very easy to set up and would be easy for you or a parent to check on to make sure that students were not adding sites that were inappropriate.  All the tools that I have learned about so far in this class would be beneficial to students in their own ways, but I feel that a tool like Delicious is one of the most beneficial I have seen so far.  Except for maybe RSS, this is the best way to put a lot of information about many different topics into one easily accessible place.  It can also be looked at by multiple people and you have access to other people’s pages so that you can find even more sites that might be helpful.  This is one tool that I will continue to use and either have my students each create their own or have the class as a whole keep one that all students will be able to contribute to.