Whew! Content overload! Thank-goodness for the tools we are learning! I have signed up and begun exploring Diigo – as a personal organizational tool and a way to collaborate and learn with others. I have been pondering the term “tag” – never having truly looked into the definition and now have a much better understanding of the word. I love how easy it is to generate lists, based on the tags associated to the web page, to better categorize and track good web sites. I am curious about the colleagues I work with and wonder if they have been using Diigo, or other like social bookmarking sites. I think it will be worth a conversation with them next week. As a side note – I sure enjoy the “Common Craft – You Tube” videos embedded in our learning experiences as I continue to grow my brain and appreciate the alternate way of sharing information. Thank-you Keith for including these videos into our learning experiences.
I can see myself building my library and then connecting my home-based parents to my webpage so that they can access information, and resources that are pertinent to their child. I have already added specific pdf documents from Open School BC, as well as the general link to that web page. I have included other “free-to-use” resources and web pages as well as relevant cites that I think families would benefit from (i.e. Common Sense Media). I have also added the Diigo symbol to my browser to efficiently add things as they come up.
It all seems a bit overwhelming when I begin, but as I continue to muddle my way through these tools I am slowly beginning to form a place where I can see and understand the applicability of what I am doing in this course and can immediately use the information learned to better my practice.
I think these tools are great for a teacher’s ‘curator’ role. I find my work at the university includes about a dozen of these sorts of problems each week. A faculty member will want some options for online drawing tools, not too many, with the dogs weeded out. If I keep my social bookmarking up to date (not as easy in the last couple of years – but I used to be quite on top of it) then I can point them right to the list generated by the appropriate tag on my Diigo account. Most of the people I work with don’t want to have to spend 15 minutes each with 2 different tools only to find they’re unsuitable so the ability to recommend is highly valued.
Keith