Del.icio.us For Teachers and Learners
Posted by Sandra Pinto Pires | Filed under Bookmark, Net Tips, Web tools
I have been using del.icio.us for more than two years now, and I can’t stop being delighted!
I use del.icio.us almost everyday and I have nearly 500 bookmarks.
There are so many web sites on the net that we find and want/need to use wherever at anytime – it would be extremely difficult to remember the addresses of all of them.
And even if we add our preferred websites to the favourites or bookmarks on our web browser (Internet Explorer/Safari/Firefox, etc) at college, we wouldn’t be able to access them from home and they wouldn’t be well organised.
That’s why this is so delicious!
What is del.icio.us?
It’s called online social bookmarking.
It’s your personal web site where you can save and categorise your favourites/bookmarks.
But it is more than this… You can also find out what web sites others find interesting. So… Del.icio.us saves a link to anything you viewed on the web and allows you to share these links with other teachers or with your students.
And like all the excellent web 2.0 tools, del.icio.us is FREE.
It’s really easy to create an account and add a “bookmarklet” button to your web browser. Don’t worry if you have Firefox, the del.icio.us button is already embedded into its toolbar.
Watch this superb video if you still didn’t quite get it and to get started. The instructions are pretty clear and easy to follow.
Why should you use del.icio.us?
. Save and access your bookmarks anywhere you have web access on any computer
. Teachers and students can find resources at home and access them in college
. Share web sites with your colleagues and learners
. Find your bookmarks easily by keywords/tags
. Use related tags to narrow or extend your searches
. Add a description to a saved link
. Find out about new sites from other del.icio.us users
. Subscribe to other del.icio.us users
. Check out the most popular links
How can you use del.icio.us with your students?
. Create unique class tags
. Create a class network
. Tag by subject content topic
. Share web sites for students’ research or projects
. Recommend e-books
. Subscribe to favourite tags – helps with research
. Use the search box to make it easier to find useful web sites
Del.icio.us delights
- Your del.icio.us Network
The Network on del.icio.us connects you to other del.icio.us users. These can be your colleagues, other teachers you met in a conference or you bumped on to one of those net forums or even new people you come across when exploring del.icio.us.
Having a network allows you to collect your del.icio.us “buddies’” latest bookmarks.
- Your del.icio.us inbox
Here you’ll find bookmarks that have been sent to you by other users. Whenever you’ve got a bookmark in your inbox, the mail icon on the right top corner will let you know.
Sending a bookmark to someone else’s Inbox is easy: Just tag the bookmark with “for:” followed by their username, like “for:spires”.
If you add people to your “Network”, it’s even easier to send them bookmarks, because when saving a bookmark, the “People” tab will have their names and you can click those names to automatically add “for:” tags with their usernames.
- Your del.icio.us Subscriptions
Allow you to keep an eye on your favourite tags. You only have to add a tag to your subscriptions and del.icio.us watches for bookmarks saved with that tag and delivers them to your subscriptions page.
For example, I subscribe to bookmarks tagged with “SmartBoard” to check what everyone is bookmarking on Smartboard.
To subscribe tags that interest you, just go to “subscriptions”, click on “Add a subscription”, type in the tag and press on “add”.
- Your del.icio.us Search
The search box lets you explore the bookmarks of your or others’ page. You can search for del.icio.us user’s bookmarks, your network’s bookmarks or tags.
Here’s my del.icio.us link. Feel free to use it!
http://delicious.com/spires
