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Important Tip for New Teachers…Save your bookmarks in an organized way.
I was surprised recently when I talked to a new teacher that was saving her bookmarks to her favorites. She was happy to have the hundreds of bookmarks (many she had collected in college) but found it difficult to find the ones she wanted easily. I mentioned Diigo and Delicious and she said she had not heard of them. That blew my mind. Why hadn’t she learned about a tool I couldn’t live without?
That’s why I am writing this post. Bookmarking your resources, in an organized way, will save you time, energy and possibly even money. I have used Delicious and Diigo, both are very easy to use because they have bookmarklet tools that allow the user to bookmark a page that they are on easily. Currently I use Diigo and I highly recommend it. I also use LiveBinders too.I am able to find and share my resources easily an because they are hosted online I can access them from any computer. There are many more things you can do with your saved bookmarks on either of these sites, such as bundling, sharing and also viewing the bookmarks of others.
***Also make sure you tag your bookmarks. It’s easy to do and is well worth the few seconds it takes. Tags are descriptive words that describe the link you are saving.
Bookmark in an organized way and you will be a very happy camper throughout your teaching career.
Recently I was asked what sites do I feel would be “must-haves” for any teacher no matter what subject they taught, whether gen. ed. or spec. ed., elementary or high school, etc. I thought about it for a minute or two and came up with this answer. (Drum roll please!) The two sites I chose are Google Reader and Delicious. The reason why is that they help you find the type of sites you are seeking quickly and easily, no matter the subject. Both of these sites can be social too. I’ll get to what makes them social below.
Using Google Reader is a way to keep you current on everything your interested in and make you aware of what’s new and up-and-coming. You subscribe to blogs that you like and your reader keeps track of all their updates. This way you do not have to check the blogs that you read everyday for new posts. This would be very time consuming. You can just check your Google Reader. Your reader can be private, social or both. Being social means that you can share what you have on your reader and you can access other people’s readers too. The reason for checking out other people’s Google Readers and what they like or subscribe to, is maybe they have the links to something you didn’t know about and now you can use it too. You can gain a lot of information, that will benefit you and your class, by reading educational blogs and Google Reader is just a great way of accessing them.
To get a Free Google Reader account I believe you need a Free Gmail account. While you’re setting up your accounts don’t forget to get Google Voice so you can make phone calls from your computer for Free! Check out this previous post.
If you use Google Chrome as your browser (and I highly recommend it) you may also like Feedly. Feedly transposes everything in your Google Reader into a magazine like format. It just adds a nicer look to the subscriptions in you reader.
Delicious is a Free bookmarking tool. It is used for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks. It is also social. Using Delicious enables you to access your bookmarks from any computer. You can get them at home as well as at work, or any other place for that matter. This is great in itself but because you can use it socially (or privately) you can share your bookmarks with others as well as access theirs.
For example say you are teaching a unit on “recycling” and need some resources to teach a good lesson. You could search the web for a few hours and hopefully find a few good resources or you could use your Delicious account to access what other people have already bookmarked for “recycling” or maybe “recycling lesson”, or “recycling for kids”. This makes your “recycling” search much more time efficient because other people have done the search for you. Likewise you are doing the same for them. Other people can search through your bookmarks to see your worthwhile finds.
Delicious also allows you to follow others. For example, you can set it up so when “JaneDoeTeacher” adds a new bookmark it is made available to you. Just as you can follow others, others can follow you. I would certainly consider this part of a good PLN.
There are other sites similar to Google Reader and Delicious but I just wrote about these because they are the ones I use. Also there is so much more you can do using Google Reader and Delicious but alas my fingers are getting a little tired so I’ll let you discover the rest on your own…or maybe I’ll add another post in the future. I really hope you check them out because like the title of this post says these are “must-haves” for any teacher.
Check out My Blogroll (to the right of the page) for some for some of the great educational blogs I read. Lots of my posts have come from these blogs.
Please share your ideas with me by clicking here.
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My Other Blogs/Websites
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