Now that's Delicious!!!

Work computer, home computer, iPhone, iPads, and all the other computers in between, how can I possibly keep track of everything?  It is getting easier and easier to do so.  Not only do they have online solutions to manage your online data, they have also developed ways that you can access your website bookmarks from anywhere.  Delicious!

This site allows you to manage all of the sites you use very easily and effectively.  As well, it allows you to tag each site and create bundles to help you narrow your search quickly.  Not only this, you can share with whomever you wish and follow others.  But how can this be used in the classroom to teach our students?

With blended learning becoming more and more popular, it will be important that we help students organize their online research in an efficient manner.  Students with delicious accounts will be able to easily submit the sites they used for research or to build their background knowledge.  Teachers will then be able to quickly access these sites to check the student’s ability to select reliable sites, paraphrase, and their ability to extract information correctly.

As well, teachers will be able to create bundles of sites that students will need to reference for a specific task.  For instance, in a critical inquiry unit, perhaps students need to develop a background understanding of several concepts before they can begin down the path of their inquiry investigations.  These sites could be tagged on Delicious, posted on their class blog or online platform.  Students could reference these sites as needed and even add more sites to the bundle to help their peers.

Students may also use this as a tool to help them collaborate more effectively.  By giving them to power to share tagged sites with their peers, they can build resources together and all have access to the same information.  They can also find other students who have already researched some of these topics and access their findings.

Overall, Delicious is a great tool that can help make the students and teachers’ lives easier.  It also fits nicely into a blended learning environment creating a collaborative approach to sharing information.