GEMS People Teaching & Learning

Connecting people to Ideas. That is what Mr. Berners-Lee wanted to do when he lead the team that created the Internet. Todays Net is massive. There are 3.083 billion pages indexed href=”http://www.metamend.com/internet-growth.html” mce_href=”http://www.metamend.com/internet-growth.html”>according to Google .
Everyday as a teacher I find excellent resources online that I want to use in class and share with my students. But without break copy-right laws and spending hours reformatting text into Word or PDF documents, how can I index what I want to share- and then share it?

One answer to this question is to use del.icio.us .

del.icio.us is as clever as its name. It is a very easy to use but robust website indexing system. You can create you own index; use tags to manage the content; and search the index to find what other people are using as well.
Think of it as your own Google. Your del.icio.us bookmarks can be shared online if you have a web-page or your school has a web-site. If not, then you can simply have your students or peers add a link to their browsers at home.

Tagging is one thing that makes del.icio.us very useful. Most people have done tagging while using web technologies like Facebook or Myspace. When tagging something you simple use one or two words to describe it. For example, if I find a website on Geometry that is good for students, I would tag it as “geometry” and “theorems” . People who search del.icio.us for “geometry” will be able to find my useful links as well.

To start using del.icio.us you should install a small plug-in for your browser.
Follow the links below to install for Internet Explorer and Firefox. Then I have linked a slide-show that teaches you how to use del.icio.us.

Install
for Internet Explorer

href=”http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension” mce_href=”http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension”>Install for Firefox

href=”http://www.slideshare.net/adrian.muller/delicious-tutorial” mce_href=”http://www.slideshare.net/adrian.muller/delicious-tutorial”>del.icio.us
Tutorial

If you have any problems sharing your del.icio.us links with others, please contact me for further assistance.

One final point about using del.icio.us is that it allows you have a centralized index. So you are not dependent on having your index on one computer and in one browser. No matter where you are, as long as there is an Internet Connection, you can get to your information.

Pretty cool. Very simple. Very Useful.