Thing 17 - Social Bookmarking

Before this assignment, I had never heard of the concept of "social bookmarking." After watching the tutorial videos provided, and spending some time exploring the websites I feel I have a better grasp of what social bookmarking websites, and Delicious in particular have to offer. As a prospective teacher, I feel that Delicious has something to offer me in staying organized. One of the tutorial videos mentioned how a browser's bookmark tab can get crowded and unorganized in a hurry. One of the nice things about Delicious is that one can tag websites in order to fit them into a specific category. This way a user can sort his favorite websites by category so that it is easier to find and use them in the future. I'm uncertain of how social bookmarking can be helpful in the classroom, but I can see it's use when preparing and organizing future lessons. Given that I wish to be a math teacher, I could tag certain sites based on the content and lessons they have to offer. If there is a website I feel is really strong on quadratic equations I could use the tags algebra, quadratic equations, etc. in order to group that site with similar sites in the future. This is certainly a tool I can see finding its way into my tool bag in the future.

Thing 16 - Organizing with Web 2.0

There are a lot of different organizational tools available on the Internet. The first one I explored was the iGoogle homepage. I wasn't aware of iGoogle's existence until this assignment so it was surprising to see that Google will be removing it on November 1, 2013. Goes to show how fast the Internet is evolving - in five years its replacement will probably be rendered irrelevant as well. Anyway, iGoogle was easy to use. I found a couple interesting gadgets to add to the original template that would theoretically reduce my time surfing the Web for news. However, I'll probably keep my old homepage because as I stated before, I kind of enjoying each site individually to see what is new. I suppose it's just my resistance to change.

Online calendars and to-do lists have a lot of potential for people who need to stay organized and have mobile access. Since these applications are online they can be accessed from a variety of different points. While I don't use an online calendar or to-do list at the moment, it would certainly increase my organizational skills, which at this point is limited to things I do and don't remember. Thankfully I remember most things which has decreased my incentive to use either online or traditional calendars. In the future when more and more things are on my plate, I will probably have no choice but to change how I organize.

One of the tools I found from the list was the PDFConverter website. One of the benefits of converting a file to a PDF is that those who open the file do not need to have Microsoft Word, or any other word processor in order to open and read the document. This could be helpful when I put my syllabus or letter to the parents on my website so that it can be easily accessed by both parents and students whenever there is a question about classroom expectations, grading policies, etc.

Thing 15 - The Wide World of Wikis

I am a big fan of several different wikis on the Internet. I think it's pretty awesome that there are wikis devoted to several different subjects and non-academic hobbies like video games. The most famous wiki of all is Wikipedia, and I'd imagine that everyone in our class has looked up at least one article on Wikipedia. Personally I can spend up to an hour just reading about different articles on the site. For example, I may see an article on the front page about some event in World War II. From there I may see another link within that article of something else I'm interested in and then open up another tab on my browser. By the end, it is not uncommon for me to have six or more tabs open from various articles I cared to learn more about. Although the productivity of doing this could be argued, I find that it's an easy way to let an hour or so go on by.

I'm not sure how I would use a wiki of my own creation. Being that my goal is to be a mathematics teacher, I'm not sure how it could work in the classroom, unless there was an assignment about the history of a famous mathematician and I wanted the class to upload their articles onto a classroom wiki. That doesn't mean there couldn't be use for third party wikis, although a couple of the math ones I looked at seemed to be incomplete. Perhaps in a couple of years they will have enough content to prove useful in the classroom.