Thing # 19 Web 2.0 Awards

Have you ever wanted to be on the "cutting edge" of things? Do you ever feel like you are "behind the times" and your students are more "hip" than you are? Don't feel bad, there is hope. Web 2.0 Awards at http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0/short is here to help. It is an awesome site with website awards (1st, 2nd, & 3rd place, and honorable mention) for different categories ranging from bookmarking to gaming to social networking. The websites are nominated and voted upon. It is a great launchpad for leaping into the technical savvy world that our students dwell in. If you are looking for specific types of websites for your classroom such as a place to get images for students to use and really don't know anything other than "googling" this is a great place to go. You will find flickr listed under photos and digital imaging and a couple of other websites that are similar in content.

Give Web 2.0 Awards a try and you will soon be understanding some of the "cutting edge" websites that many of your students and colleagues are utilizing.

last minute thought:
Need to slow down all those twitters for a few days while on vacation? Just hit the snooze button. http://twittersnooze.com/

Thing #13-Tagging and Discovering Delicious

OMG! Delicious is so addictive. It is a website where you can bookmark your favorite websites and tag them. Tagging is basically giving one word descriptors to help you "file" something. Amazon.com is famous for their tagging. With Delicious you choose the tags that you want. There are often reccommendations but you are free to create your own tags so that you can search for the items when needed. For example: DeweyBrowse.org is a website that has links to other websites that are catalogued according to the Dewey Decimal System. I tagged it under the following tags: library, cataloging, Dewey, library, kids, links, research, school, websites, resources, and DeweyDecimalSystem. These are all ways that I would used to search for this website again. It is like a personal search engine of my "favorites". There is a program that if you use internet explorer as your browser to easily download all your favorites. I was not that fortunate. I have been using AOL for forever it seems and had favorites bookmarked that I wanted to add to http://www.delicious.com/. I had to enter all the favorites "by hand"---copying and pasting URLs and labeling the tags. I was so OCD about it one night I stayed up until 3 am. It took me a few days to do, but it is finally done! On the plus side, I was able to check links to see if they were still hot and some were definitely not! And then I also wondered what was I thinking when I saved some of them in favorites, because they definitely weren't ones I went back to much.