Thing #14 Tagging Technorati

A mighty breeding of blogs has been going on.  We're "currently tracing 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media" and "over 175,000 new blogs a day," says Technorati.

I like Google

blog search.  It moves faster and looks cleaner.  I also like tag galaxy

for visually demonstrating the power of tagging.

Thing #13 Delicious Bookmarks

OK.  Picture you're on vacation at a resort. Before you go out to dinner, you stop at the guest computer in the lobby and try to remember the address of one of your favorite websites.  On your computer at home, you have it bookmarked.  But here in Costa Rica, after a day on the beach, you can't quite recall the name of your step-daughter-in-law's blog about her baby.  

Delicious can be the new place where you store your bookmarks, so they are on-line, wherever you are.  

Plus, you can see how popular your sites are . . . get exposed to more bookmarks on a topics than you realized . . .

. . . and pass a lot of time in the lobby of your vacation hotel, spiraling down the rabbit hole of the Internet, going from one "interesting" website to another.

Organizing tool, expanding your awareness of like-minded sites, a time-consuming tool as you go on and on = it's delicious.

 

  

Thing #12 A Rollyo Way to Search

School is out and I'm going to move through this "class" with more diligence. Tonight I learned about Rollyo, which "allows you to create your own search tool for just the websites you know and trust."  

One topic I'm going to be exploring more is media literacy, and hopefully working with the support of 826LA, I will create a persuasive unit with guest speakers coming to the classroom.

To develop knowledge, students may peruse my Rollyo list of sites.  

I see now that the students can use my listed sites to access topics they might put into the search bar.  Hmm.  I'm not that familiar with the sites, having just found them tonight, so I'm not that comfortable with saying that I "trust" anything found on them.  But it seems that Rollyo can help narrow the search, and contain the selections.  

That said, this exercise got me searching about possible sites, and thinking about how to create a web research project for students.