Chapter+4 +Using+Delicious.com+in+the+classroom

Using Delicious.com in the Classroom


What is Delicious.com?
Delicious.com is a social bookmarking web site that allows the registered user to bookmark as many of their favorite web sites as they wish. Have you every find a great web site, bookmarked it and then lost it? Or found a great site and then could not remember how to get back to the site? Well Delicious.com will save you from all the grief of "adding something to your favorites". Delicious.com requires the user to create an account, very quick process (3-5 minutes). Once the user has created an account, the user has free reigns to bookmark ANY and ALL of their favorite sites on the web. Think of it as your own personal, unlimited and unhindered favorites organizer. The other really cool thing about Delicious.com is that anyone that has internet has access to your site if you so wish to expose. Delicious.com does have other options for organizing and tagging.

media type="youtube" key="A1pOsYjCvE8" height="214" width="263"

Why Use Delicious.com?
Delicious.com allows the user to arrange their favorite sites in a manner that any other user that comes along can use. It's basically a public website that anyone can come across. Don't worry, there are ways to secure your Delicious.com site from others if you don't want others knowing what sites you look at. But from an educational standpoint, in a classroom that students are using the web for their research, a teacher can go through and put sites on his or her Delicious.com, give their students the web address and only allow them to use the approved sites on their wiki for information. This allows the teacher to select the appropriate and educational sites he or she wants the students to access, bookmark them and turn the students loose. All works cited pages should look the same!

Saving a Bookmark and Tagging.
Once the user has found their site, they need to copy the URL address at the top. They then need to return to Delicious.com, click on the link in the upper right hand corner "Save a new bookmark". A new page will appear for the user to fill in a description and to paste the URL address in. At the very bottom of the page is a spot for tagging your site. This is important because on your home Delicious.com page, on the right hand side you will see all of your different categories of tags. A tag is a category or kind of like a folder for the web sites. For example, a biology teacher may tag 10 sites that have to do with biology and title that tag "biology". The teacher may also teach anatomy, therefore he or she puts all the approved anatomy sites into an "anatomy" tag. So when biology users get on the teachers Delicious.com site, they know exactly what tag to click on to access the approved biology websites.

Exploring other Users.
Delicious.com has millions of users. Just about all of them are public. So anyone can view and use their sites. That's the whole idea of using Delicious.com, allowing others to see what you think is cool or educational. It can also be used for complete privacy. But that's not really the focus, especially in an educational setting. When you are on your homepage of Delicious.com, you will notice once you see a site that you've bookmarked there are numbers on the right hand side. If you put your cursor over that number, it indicates the number of other people who have personally bookmarked that specific site as well on Delicious.com. If you click on that number, you will see a list of the people who have bookmarked that site and you can explore their bookmarked sites. The way this can come in handy is if you have bookmarked a biology site and you see all the other people who have done so, they too may have additional sites you may not know about bookmarked and you can access them as well!