Social Bookmarking. What was wrong with using that star icon on our browser? Ha. Well, when deciding on what bookmarking website to use, I was torn between Furl.com and Delicious.com. I finally decided on Delicious and I actually like it! I use a computer at school and a different one at home so I always had two lists of favorites with the exact same information on them. Now, all I have to do is use Delicious anywhere, anytime!

I’m still working on the tagging system, so my list is a little unorganizedm, but it definitely has potential to become very useful for me. So many times I come across great websites and end up losing them because I forget to go into my favorites, but now it’s so easy!

Here is the link to the beginning of my social bookmarks:
http://delicious.com/lishaj320 

This post is a follow up to my previous post on RSS feeds.

After being subscribed to 10 websites for a little more than a week, I wasn’t too impressed with the results. I mean, sure it’s awesome that you get all this information sent to you and that you only have to go to one website, but you get SO much information it’s overwhelming! I spent more time reading all the feeds than I would’ve if I had just Google’d the information. However, there was some interesting links that I came across:

Top 5 Links from my RSS Feeds this week:
http://mashable.com/2008/11/09/what-the-web-cant-help-you-do/

http://mashable.com/2008/11/06/google-street-view-art/

Anything from the National Association of Special Education Teachers

http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20081103/rainfall-autism-may-be-linked?src=RSS_PUBLIC

Anything from Perez Hilton….just  because it’s funny!

Personally, I do not plan on keeping up with RSS. I’m going leave my subscriptions on Google Reader and probably check them once a week. I just don’t see the addiction to RSS….

I just read the blog Teaching Moments by Will Richardson http://weblogg-ed.com/ and thought, “Wow, he brings up a really great point!” The blog discussed when teachers, need to stop teaching the lessons out of the book and make the lessons about what is really happening in the world at this moment. A lesson that we all should’ve been teaching on Monday and Tuesday was about the election. There could’ve been so many lessons involved – historical elections, race relations, what it means to be republican/democratic, how to decipher between fact and fiction. How many teachers out there used the election in at least one lesson during the previous weeks? And do you plan on continuing this lesson through out the year? 

Will’s blog stated that these teachable moments (see list below) make our students better citizens and I couldn’t agree more. So teachers, next time your students are fascinated with the leak in your ceiling when it rains – stop and do a mini lesson on water or if they see a really unusal bird outside, do some research on it. Don’t be afraid to put your teaching manual down and teach from the heart. You’d be surprised how natuarally the lesson comes to you.

Some teachable moments according to Will Richardson: please feel free to add your own suggestions.

This morning I was searching for a session of the K-12 Online Conference that I would like to review for class and I found this session:http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=340 -Parental Engagement in the 21st Century – Leveraging web 2.0 tools to engage parents in non-traditional ways

This session discussed how parents are using the 1.0 Web instead of the 2.0 Web. The hosts discussed that parents of this era are using the internet for email and Google but do not understand the new tools out there. They didn’t grow up online like the children today are and no one has trained the parents on how to use the tools. Parents do not use the social networking like students do.

The session stated that children are spending more time outside of school writing (facebook, myspace, blogs) than they are in school…and I agree! However, no one is truly monitoring what these children are doing. Sure, we have filters at school, but that just encourages students to find ways around the filter. And because the parents don’t understand what their children are doing online, they often don’t pay attention to the online behavior.

I think it would be great if the community would hold free classes (or for a very reasonable cost) maybe 3 or 4 times a year to parents on Web 2.0 tools. Of course, the classes wouldn’t have to go into great detail, they just need to be shown what is out there and what their children may be participating in…good or bad. If schools and communities can collaborate with parents, I think we would certainly see an increase of parents trying the new web out!

If you’re new to Social Bookmarking, like I am, read the article on WikiPedia for a complete definition of social bookmarking –  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking but it’s basically, taking your favorite website and organizing them publicly. Personally, I don’t really like this…yet. I’m so use to having my websites saved on my favorites organized into folders, it’s tough to change. I chose to use the site delicious.com for my bookmarking - http://delicious.com/lishaj320. I haven’t done much with this yet because I’m still learning. Hopefully, it will prove to be a useful tool.