While perusing my E learning, I was fascinated by the term Delicious.com so I decided to click on the link to see what awaited me. It was indeed delicious. I heard about social book marking but never had the opportunity to use it so I ventured into the unknown. I stumbled upon a social bookmarking service and what I found was a gold mine for my children to use in the classroom.
I taught my Standard Five children how to save WebPages to my favourites (with supervision off course) for future access and they all grasped it very easily. They have found it to be very beneficial and used it often whenever we visited the labs. Delicious.com provides me with a new way to bookmark but this proves to be more effective and reliable. Through creative tagging, the students can organize and manage their bookmarks for easy accessibility. Social bookmarking can teach essential skills in literacy such as sorting, labelling and providing appropriate titles. The students will be given the opportunity to share links and communicate globally with other internet users.
My colleagues this is just another tool to stimulate our children and create a literate society. Literacy cannot be restricted to a book and chalkboard but it is best taught through engaging students in a meaning making process. This new literacy is what is called ‘network literacy’ and it is just another way of communicating!
well Shasta the fact remains that students today are using technology whether we like it or not. It is therefore up to teachers to use the resources available to make this use of technology educationally beneficial to students. If they can grasp concepts so quickly through ICT tools then we have an advantage where we can use it to assist them in literacy.Once they see the need to become literate and how the ICT's can assist them in this regard they will then buy into the education process.Remember, they are already intrinsically motivated through their fascination with ICT
ReplyDeleteYummy!!!! I too have been exposing the students that I teach to the use of various tools involving the INTERNET. One of the tools mainly being the search engine “Google or Blackle” Its unfortunate though that the children seems to have embraced the technology although most of their parents have not. A case in point would be a few weeks ago I was involved in a discussion with a parent who was really upset over her daughter's teacher posting home work assignments on face book for the class and encouraging students to join a page that was set up for his class. When she made the comment (can't type what she said..this blog is PG rated) about the teacher I listened only. I was inspired by the saying of the Great Dr. Eric Williams. “Let the …...bray” The use of ICT has made the experience of learning alive to the children of this era. It enables them to be more engaged. The advantages far surpassing the disadvantages. Just imagine children would have no excuse that they didn't get the home work..They live on face book , you tube etc.. My hats off to you for your experimenting with the technology. By the way next them you go exploring I'm volunteering to keep you company, just in case you get lost...
ReplyDeleteHi Shasta I must agree that when you told me about delicious.com, I was also quite interested with what this site had to offer. I remember thinking to myself what did she say was it delicious. I thought that you were speaking about food. To my surprise it was not food but rather something that existed that I had no idea about. As you assisted me in creating my site I started thinking about how many web sites it can store. Obviously my favourites folder will be cleaned out and stored in cyberspace. What is most significant about delicious.com is the use of tagging and sharing your sites with others. This is noteworthy because fellow teachers can share their websites with you and vice versa.
ReplyDeleteI particularly like the tagging of the websites whereby you can organize your websites for particular aspects of reading so you do not just have a reading tag but you can be more specific so when you have to get your research sites it’s easy and very accessible. Indeed students will benefit from this site especially when they have to do research papers, their collected data can also be easily stored. Technology is so vast, I always ask myself so what will I learn next. The result, yes something new that makes life easier and yes something that I can use with my school work.