Excuse me, I’m salivating...this is Delicious

Watching a CommonCraft video this week (http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english) it became clear why I have trouble organizing my Favourites and finding site I enjoy or find useful: There are over 15 billion webpages on the Internet! It is no surprise then, that with the limited capability my computer has for storing Favourites and the three different computers I use daily, I am ruthless about which sites I actually add to my Favourites. It is possible that del.ici.ous has solved this problem for me.

After watching the CommonCraft video ‘Bookmarking in Plain English,’ my instinct was to dive right in and sign up for an account. But this week I resisted the temptations the Internet offers for scattered attention and immediate gratification and first diligently and thoroughly researched the tool in a number of different ways. I was excited about the possibility of sharing my bookmarked sites, but was relieved to read on Wikipedia that I could select the people with whom I would be sharing. I understood the function of tags from my time with Flickr and TeacherTube, and after reading "Teaching Today" (http://teachingtoday.glencoe.com/) I appreciate that the tags on delicious will be created by people (even people I know!) and not a computer as is the case when researching on Google. Finally, after my exploration thus far in this course I am beginning to scratch the surface of understanding of the power of networking with Web 2.0 tools. So, when I finally arrived at delicious.com to sign up for an account I was already excited about and appreciative of the number of ways that delicious could be useful and refreshing for me.

There are a number of applications which seem obvious to me at this time:
-Personally, I can avoid the hassle of constantly logging in to my remote work desktop from home, simply for the purpose of retrieving one website adderss from my Favourite list at work. By bookmarking these sites on a website, I can access my favourite websites from any computer with Internet access.
-With my students, I can access my bookmarked sites from any one of their computers, and they can access the sites for which I allow access. I wish I had thought of this when I taught grade one and had to run around to 24 laptops to type the address of a new site for each of my students.
-I used Diigo a little bit after an inservice two years ago, but without the using social aspect of this type of online program, I was unclear of the purpose and benefits. The social networking makes the capabilities of del.ici.ous endless!
-I will most certainly share this with my staff at our upcoming inservice. At the very least, there are a number of teachers at my school using SmartBoard Interactive Whiteboards in our classrooms for a second year, and are hoping to collaborate. I have already fired off e-mails to six colleagues to invite them to delicious. What a perfect way to share our discoveries on the run!
-After using delicious for just one week I am already aware that the searches are more powerful when participating in a network with others. I also agree with the assertion that we are more accountable for our searches when doing so as a part of a community or network of people such as in delicious (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf). While there seems to be near limitless space on the web for me to add to my delicious account, I am very selective about what I add and what tags I use because I know my peers may be using them with their students.
At this time, I anticipate using social bookmarking as a tool for myself as a collaborative educator until I fully understand its capabilities and limitations. But I strongly believe that this new form of collaboration will help me to reach my students in new and interesting ways. I also believe that it will become and excellent tool for me to share with students during research and online search opportunities later in the year. I will at the very least frequently demonstrate my use of my account on our SmartBoard as we navigate the web together in class. At the risk of sounding naive and blindly optimistic, the limitations at this time seem primarily to be my lack of familiarity with and knowledge of the tool. I am motivated and excited by the possibilities of social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is another example of how the interactive nature of Web 2.0 is invigorating and furthers our practice. This week I spent two days at Camp Warwa with 75 grade six students doing team building and trust activities. At the group challenge activities, students discovered that they were able to accomplish more together than by floundering about on a challenging activity by them selves. In fact, when asked to rate the group’s success and then their own personal success, students consistently rated the group higher than themselves. They had a great discussion about synergy and the concept that the achievements of the group are far greater than the sum of its parts. This is true of collaboration in education as well. When teachers work together and collaborate they become more reflective and stronger teachers than working independently. When students collaborate the same is true, and I dare say that when students and teachers collaborate in meaningful ways with each other they also achieve more than they would working side by side. By extension then, I believe there is an implication here for working with parents as well. By sharing my bookmarked sites with interested parents, they can supplement our inclass activities at home or talk with their child about a video that we viewed together in class. I believe that in elementary education, this completes a full circle of a collaborative learning team. When teachers, colleagues, students and parents work together and use the tools