Week 6 - Thing # 14 - Technorati

Advantages of Technorati - you can look at like minded individuals and read their blogs without search strings in google; the current posts are listed first
Disadvantages - there is a lot of information in the layout of the site and it's easy to get distracted

Thoughts about tagging:
I think that the social tagging of sites and blogs is interesting. It's a way to see what other people are looking at and how they think, but cultural differences, slang, and the fact that there is no uniformity (like in a catalog) can slow down the process of finding what you're looking for. It would be a fun lesson to show a group of kids the same list of websites and see what they tag them as - I'm sure that would be eye opening for the students too.

Week 6 - Thing # 13 - Del.icio.us

I played with del.icio.us and watched the tutorial provided. I think that the site is easy to use, and just as easily leads to off into the research void - by that, I mean that you can easily get sidetracked and off task - finding a lot of neat things, but not necessarily what you came looking for :) I think that students will enjoy the social aspect of it, but teaching kids about reliability of a source takes on a whole new level when you start to include what other people bookmark. Students of all ages have to be careful when looking at the authority of their sources and keep in mind that just because a site has been bookmarked by many doesn't mean that it's a good source for a report. All that being said, I think that to keep up on current politics and other current issues, del.icio.us is a very useful tool.

a quick note for my mentor and classmates

Hi all, our school server appears to be down, therefore, no access to school email. Sigh, I hope we hire a new tech person soon. In the meantime, here's my home address (remove words and replace with proper symbols):
johnamey at empireaccess dot net.

Thing 12 - week 5

Rollyo is an easy to use site that allows you to create lists of places to search. I liked this because I could include my list of web links from my library's site on myrollyo list. I think that this could be a very useful tool, especially with a pathfinder. My pathfinders are generally broken down into type of material - book, online sources, free web, images, etc. What a neat tool to replace the free web sites, and possibly the online sources. I try to distinguish the difference between free web and databases with students. I can also see this as something to help teach reliability of sources with students - what a place to create links of "fake" websites - a la the tree octopus - for students and teachers to explore!

Thing 11 - week 5

I have been interested lately in a way to organize my bookmarks. I have three machines at work and sometimes it's tough to remember which computer has which bookmarks; I also have some of the same sites marked on both machines. So, in an attempt to organize, I chose the social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia to join. It happens to be one I researched on my own before school was out and one of the big features for me is that I can mark some or all of my bookmarks private. I know, it defeats the social part of it, but for now I'm happy with it. You also need an openid, yahoo, facebook, or some other type of account to use it.

I like the fact that Ma.gnolia creates tags based on your folder names when you import the bookmarks. I'm excited to go back to my room this summer and export all of my bookmarks and spend some time tagging and organizing, which I know will help me next year. Ma.nolia also has an application that you can add to your browser so you can add sites while surfing. Sharing of sites with other group members can be an educational tool - one that I will explore further this summer. In the meantime this is cool! :)

Thing 10 - Week 5 - Image Generators

I think that students would enjoy playing with different image generators. I'm also imagining that many have without realizing it while customizing their myspace pages. The majority of generators that I played with have sections for myspace, facebook, and other social sites. The two that I liked the most were Image Chef (what a fun name) and the Confucius Says Generator. FD Toys was also easy to use, but somewhat more limited in what it can accomplish. This would be fun to create images for web pages as well as getting students to add better graphics to their power point presentations. Some of these sites allow you to work with video clips and webcams, which is wonderful as it allows students to create better multimedia projects.