Social Butterfly

We have been reading and talking about social bookmarking all morning...and I mean ALL morning. I now have a delicious site and know how to use it. I can see how this would be useful for my class. I can preview sites ahead of time that I want kids to use. Then I can tag them in one group so the kids can easily access them without having to waste time and keystrokes. Previously I had to ask the media specialist to post websites on our school site so the kids could get to them. Now I am able to do this on my own!

Diigo seems a little more user friendly, but now I have already immersed myself in delicious.

As I use and explore web quests, I can see that the social bookmarking would be very helpful in creating a web quest. That would save me time in searching for websites that someone else has already found. Students are more engaged with activities like web quests and they learn a lot about how to apply their knowledge to a problem.

I would love to do epals with my students and set up a video conference using Skype and my school's new videoconferencing hardware. I think the kids would love this and it would get them writing for a real purpose. We have tried Skype to talk with my sister-in-law in MS. The delay with the video is a little annoying but the hardest thing is getting all our kids to be still at the same time so we can all talk and see one another. I didn't realize until today that you can IM in Skype. I talked to my friend who does Virtual Public Schools for DPI using the IM feature of Skype. She told me how she has to convince principals that Skype can be useful in the classroom. :-)

Wow, I have a lot of ideas to explore and implement!