Week 4 - Google Reader and Social Bookmarking

Google Reader was better than I had expected.  I was wondering how to keep track of all the blogs for this class and how to remember which ones I had commented on and so forth.  By having Google Reader everything you need is at your finger tips.  It has made it easier to keep up with all the readings and comments to people's blogs.  I find myself asking now, where do I find good blogs and resources that will help me professional and personally.  I want to find some sites that I can follow that will help me stay up to date with the uses of technology in the classroom as well as sites to help with the content.  I am a math teacher and sometimes we forget that there are new ways to teach the same information that has been around for centuries.  So to have a few sites to follow will be exciting.

This is a great lead in to how social bookmarking is going to work.  I have found that as I was writing the first paragraph I was answering my own questions.  Social bookmarking with diigo.  With the idea of sharing resources through social bookmarking is a great concept.  Students could really use this idea when working in a group on a project or even using it from grade to grade.  This would give them a place to reference back when they were working on something and then a few years later they could go back and reference it again for a different class or to refresh their memory. 

 

All of these tools are great to have and use but our job now as educators is to educate our students on the hows of each tool.  We also need to educate our students on the drive to be "Do-it-yourself" learners.  We need to teach them the proper uses of these tools and how to be a good digital citizen.  They need to learn more about how to critic the information for validity.