Many Web users are confronted with the fact that finding a “valuable” link on the Internet can be a fruitful event if such a thing is somewhere recorded for later use. Oftentimes it does happen that those “valuable” links vanish from our eyes the moment we click on another page, and trying to recover the “valuable” site proves to be a dead-on street. Delicious.com seems to be the answer to all our worries about keeping a “log” of links that can help us keep track of the language learning pages we visit or come across while surfing the Net.
As part of the experience of this week in our “Building Teaching Skills W2010” online course, it is so exciting to see how ELT professionals and colleagues all around the world have created their delicious.com personalized pages and how the amount of links registered in their pages increase systematically (with the use of tags) and exponentially (by the number of registered entries). If something outstanding happened this week on this course, it is the personal “epiphany” all of us have had and the discovery of how to register all our “delicious” sites.
Since human memory is so limited, and we can hardly fight back our absent-mindedness at times, Delicious.com can become our “external memory card” that can keep a record of all the language learning skill-building sites we encounter in our ventures over the Internet. As a personal experience, I must admit that I used to keep those links on a separate gmail account that I created for storage purposes. I systematically classified all sites, but now that I can compare what I used to do with the things I can do now in terms of web-link storage, Delicious! is a go-of-it.
All teachers craving for extra resources to use with students, in or out of class, are bound to find sites that are worthwhile sharing, but passing post-it notes with URLs and the like is something of the past, not only because those little papers get lost but also because free online services can allow us to have access to that information anywhere we are. Now I can tell my colleagues or fellow teachers to visit my Delicious! page and profit from the things I have stored for teaching/learning purposes. And now that this E-teacher course has given room for the creation of a Internet-based teaching community, we participants should keep up with the expectations from our instructors to continue to share “vital” information to enhance our teaching anywhere we teach in this planet.
Hi Jonathan,
You are quite right. It is important to keep a record of the websites we have found useful for our teaching, but sometimes it's not so easy. Besides bookmarking the websites, I used to write all the URLs in a notebook with a short note about the site so that it is easier to find what you are looking for. But Delicious.com is much more convenient because it makes it easy to find the websites you need by looking at the tags. What is more, you can also look at the websites that others have bookmarked, so that by sharing our bookmarks we discover many other websites and learn about other possibilities that we were not aware of. Look at all the websites we have shared during these three weeks and how many new things we have learned from each other. And now that we have all our colleagues in our network, we can continue to share information about the websites we discover even when the course finishes. Great, isn't it?
All the best,
Nina
Dear Jonathan,
Your post is very nice. I like your writing. I agree with you, this Week has been a whole new experience for (I dare to say) all of us. We teachers, part of this great online course. I feel that I have learnt a lot since this course began and I am craving for more weeks like this.
You are so right about this URL saving provided by technology, the way I used to "bookmark" my links was righting them down on some paper, a paper that eventually got lost.
I like the fact of sharing and as you said using this tool will provide us great benefits even in the future, after this course is finished.
Best regards,
Tatiana
Nina and Tatiana,
thanks for your thoughtful insight on my reflection on our third week of class. It looks like with the pass of time in this course, we are bound to discover more online resources we have no idea that they existed before. I'm glad that you share my idea of continuous web-based exercises and resources sharing by means of our decilious! pages. I guess this should be a never-ending process of sharing for all of us teachers, no matter where we are in this planet.
Thanks for your comments,
Jonathan