Week 6, Thing 13

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE del.icio.us! My lists of bookmarks/favorites were getting ridiculous and organizing them was becoming an overwhelming task, compounded by the fact that the site names often gave me NO clue about the content. I couldn't tell when or why I had marked a site as worthy of being revisited. I was often frustrated, too, because I knew that I had bookmarked a site, but it was on my "other" computer, or on the same computer, but using a different browser. De.licio.us solves all of those issues for me. I have already shared it with two of my fellow teachers but I can't wait to introduce it to the rest of my faculty.

The social networking aspect of de.licio.us makes it that much more powerful, although, at the same time makes it another "temptation for distraction". I found several very useful things while exploring sites bookmarked by others. It is VERY helpful to see the tags and notes used by others. The only thing that is still sometimes irksome to me is that tags must be single words or phrases run together as single words. I still forget that sometimes when I am assigning tags to a site.

I like the idea of starting a de.licio.us account strictly for sharing educational sites with other members of the faculty. Our tech coordinator and I often send emails recommending site to the staff and some of them tell me that have a folder of those emails so they can look at the sites "when they get time." A del.icio.us account would allow us to have those sites saved for everyone to access at anytime from any computer. On top of that, we could organize and tag the sites in meaningful ways for our school community.

Eventually, I hope I can do away with all of the odd scraps of paper on which I have scribbled URL's, because all of those notes will be catalogued on del.icio.us. By then,I also hope I won't have to think so hard every time I try to remember how to type "del.icio.us."