Assessing My Experience With the Social Bookmarking Tool Del.icio.us

  Recently I was required to create a Delicious account as part of an assignment. I was apprehensive because that’s basically just my natural state, but I found that creating the account was actually pretty easy! Following the directions outlined in a YouTube video I simply went to the Del.icio.us website and logged in with my yahoo account information. It prompted me to create a toolbar button for Delicious and explained how (in my case I just had to click a button). Now, whenever I find a webpage I want to save I just click the Save to Delicious button on my toolbar. For each page I save I provide a brief note about the page and why it was useful to me. Then I label each saved page with tags or keywords to describe the content of the page. This way anyone looking for sites about “lesson plans” for instance can type in “lessonplans” and see every page saved with that tag. It’s pretty amazing! I think my favorite part about using Delicious or probably any social bookmarking tool is that it makes research easy! I can look to see what other people have found related to my interest and even see what have been the most popular sites. These sites are usually popular for a reason and usually it’s because they have been the most helpful. I guess my least favorite part about creating the Delicious account is just that it’s one more account to keep track of. I guess the idea is that Delicious will help me keep track of my various account pages but that’s thinking a little too big for me this soon. I think saving pages to Delicious could be pleasing to my OCD and maybe a little addictive! This site can be helpful in just about any course at FTCC. My class had to label the websites we are researching for this assignment with EDU271 so when I type in this tag to search for it comes up with what all of my classmates have found already. This is definitely easier than asking everyone individually or even going through a Discussion Board to read what each individual person has saved. For group projects my group members could agree on a unique tag to use on the sites we find for our research thus making it easy to see what each member has found and saved by simply typing in that tag. This helps to save us from hyperlinks that do not work due to typos or spelling errors because we have already tried our URLs out on Delicious. In my own classroom, I think Delicious would be an excellent reference for my parents. Any issue or question they have or anything they wish to expand upon that their children are learning in class can be easily researched by my providing information about Delicious. Either I can show them how to access information on Delicious and how to create an account or I can do all the legwork myself and provide them with what I have found. I always think it’s nice to provide parents with information on resources they can turn to for questions about appropriate child development or developmentally appropriate activities for their children so Delicious makes finding this information easier for me.