Thing 14: Delicious is sweet!

I love Delicious! Where have I been? Why haven’t I used this before now?

I had so much fun tagging those sites, and I kept thinking how great this will be to use with other teachers. We can all tag sites for a particular topic and share them easily without emailing so many links. Parents could also join in on the fun and see sites that were tagged as great math games, etc. I was also thinking about how fun this would be to use to share links with my friends. We often share websites and tell each other about great places to order things from…how cool would it be to share all of that in Delicious? I have grown to despise my “favorites” list. It is full of stuff…great stuff…but it is not organized. It also isn’t accessible from other computers. Hooray for Delicious!

I experimented with adding a subscription. I am still looking through what comes up to see how I can best use that. I also added someone to my network, and I created some tag bundles. This made everything much more organized, and that made me happy. I tagged sites as I was working on things for school, and I tagged a lot more of them than I realized. I love the fact that so many people are involved in organizing such a vast array of knowledge.

This idea of people coming together to make the internet more manageable reminds me of a game called Phetch that a friend told me about. You play against people anywhere in the world, and you describe (create tags) for images. The other person tries to find that image by using your tags as clues. These tags are used to create descriptive captions for images. When a visually impaired person visits a website using a screen reader, the image caption is read as well. I thought that was really cool! People playing a game are actually making information more accessible to others…