Tech Tips Tuesday

A couple of teachers that I work with have mentioned that they would love to be able to create and access a collection of their links online. At the time that they mentioned it, Delicious was blocked by our school system. Now however, it has been unblocked and is a very useful tool for this very purpose. I am putting together my own collection of links with relevant tags to help me sort them for different purposes. My plan is to share these links with other teachers, students and parents, by providing them with the address for the collection.

Teachers might like to make up a collection of sites to use with their classes.
Parents might like to make up a collection of sites for their children to access, or to save and organise sites for themselves!

So, with that in mind...

Today's tip: Getting Started With Delicious
1. Go to http://www.delicious.com/ If you want to know more before signing up, click on "Learn More".
2. Join up by clicking on 'Join Now'.
3. Follow the steps to register. You may or may not want to add the buttons to your toolbar. I find them useful as they save a lot of time when I find a site I want to add to my collection. You also may or may not want to import your bookmarks. I imported them for my personal collection, but found that it made it very cluttered. For my second account (the one I plan to use as a teacher) I didn't import any bookmarks, but rather I am building the collection and using consistent tags.
4. Once you are logged in you can explore other people's links by themed tags or by popularity.
5. You can see your own bookmarks by clicking on the "bookmarks" tag.

Saving a site to your collection
1. Find a site you like. If you installed the buttons to your toolbar, click on "Save to Delicious".
2. A page will pop up with boxes for you to add any notes you want to provide about the site, and any tags to help sort your pages by different categories.
3. It's useful to include lots of tags that are relevant to the page. Think of categories ie. early childhood, middle primary etc, but also content related: audio stories, maths, reading, books etc. If the site is popular, there will be suggested tags that you can click on to use as your own tags.
4. When you are happy with your comments and tags, click on "save".

If you do NOT install the buttons to your toolbar, you can save links by logging in and then clicking on the "Save a new link" link on the right hand side. It will then prompt you to type in the URL before taking you to the form mentioned above.

If you think it sounds useful to you, try it out and see what you think. I've been busy bookmarking and am looking forward to going back and revisiting all the things that grabbed my attention!