Online Bookmarks – Delicious
Apr 30th
Being a busy teacher, using several different machines (home PC, laptop, class PC’s, PPA room PC etc) I find it useful to be able to access all my bookmarks / favourites whichever I am on. Bring in http://delicious.com/ a way of not only keeping all your bookmarks in one place but also searching what other people are bookmarking. The use of this is you can therefore discover sites that you might find helpful in your teaching that you wouldn’t have otherwise come across.
There are several other sites such as http://www.stumbleupon.com/ - http://digg.com/ - http://www.reddit.com/ that basically do the same kind of thing. It’s down to personal taste as ever, I just think delicious is nice and simple, has an easy download so that you can have it as a button in your web browser whatever it is. The tagging system is also very useful (ie. rather than a traditional folder where you have a bookmark in 1 folder you can ‘tag’ it with various words so it is easier to find when you can’t quite remember what folder you put it in!
You can even search for a user and view all their bookmarks!
RSS Readers
Apr 25th
***UPDATE*** I would recommend Google Reader over NewsGator now – it’s easier to use and if you have an iphone or something similar its simplicity itself to read on the move.
If you are not familiar with RSS feeds, they are basically updates of any site on the internet that adds new content to the same structure it already has, examples are:
A new radio show in a series (a podcast)
The latest set of reviews for new release movies
A newly published job advert in the TES
Status updates for all your friends on Facebook, Twitter etc
The purpose of an RSS Reader is to let you know when there is a new update for any RSS feeds that you have decided to subscribe to (be notified of any updates). In other words, it lets you have all your updates in one place, without you having to individually go and check around the sites. Personally I find this useful not for the sites I go on all the time, but the next level down (the ones you forget to go and look at but are actually quite good).
There are several available, such as Internet Explorer’s inbuilt reader, Itunes has one for podcasts, Pageflakes and lots more. I have chosen NewsGator because it is free and online, so you can view all your chosen updated RSS feeds, wherever you are, whatever computer you are on.
One of the best things about NewsGator is that it is simply yet powerful. You can organise all your feeds into folders, and open and close the foldder structure just like on your PC. It’s definately worth checking out if you find yourself spending lots of time visiting sites to see if things have been updated their, or if you forget about sites where the content gets updated.
