Jun
7
Summer of New 2.0 #1 – co.mments & del.icio.us
June 7, 2008 | Tagged education, RSS, web 2.0, websites | Leave a Comment
Since (supposedly) I have some more time over the summer, I’ve decided to try challenging myself a little bit by trying some new 2.0 resource each week this summer. I’ve already got a few in mind I’d like to try and hopefully I’ll discover some new ones in the process. Of course, I’ll be looking at them from a teaching perspective and theorize on possible uses (but please feel free to add your ideas/uses). Eventually the good ones (being the ones I Iike) will become part of my page on 2.0 applications which will be coming soon. Of course, some will be added to my sidebars, as these two are already.
For this first week I’ve actually got two of them to look at, del.icio.us and co.mments. While I’ve wanted to try these out for a while, the driving force behind these two for right now is my participation in a class (as an intern/teaching assistant) for a graduate tech class at ASU West. I’ve used other social bookmarking sites, namely trackstar4teachers previously, but for the class all the students are using del.icio.us to save their bookmarks so I figured I better use it so I can answer questions. Just in terms of getting started it is pretty straightforward, though installing the buttons can be difficult if you’re working on a school/network computer and don’t have permission to install, but the bookmarklets (which you get to on the bottom of page 2 of the registration or can re-access by going through FAQ and click on the question about installing buttons on a different computer) work just as well if that is the case. It’s going to take me some time to get used to the organization of del.icio.us…I’ve gotten very used to putting things in folders but I can appreciate the value of tagging, especially as the list grows longer. Of course, this feature is what makes it good for teachers/education. Creating a list of saved sites for students to use suddenly becomes much easier since they can all access it on-line. Then by searching from tags students can find the sites to best fit their project. Even better, they can share sites they find by creating a network of shared sites and build on each others knowledge. All in all, a really good tool for both teachers and students.
Co.mments is an application I had seen on several other blogs and quickly realized the value after posting comments all over the place and realizing I wasn’t sure where they all were. Being someone who enjoys a good discussion I wanted to be able to participate without re-doing all my searches to find my comments (and follow ups). Co.mments has done a nice job of fixing that problem. After signing up and pasting a couple discussions onto my co.mments page I was able to use the RSS feed to add it to myyahoo page along with the RSS feeds from the blogs I like to read. While that is nice for me, I think the real educational value comes from adding it to a blog. This allows others to join your discussions and keeps thoughts moving around. For teachers this allows you to track student conversations. For older students (I’d say 4th grade and up) this is a really good tool to help them keep up with discussions with other students.
