Week 6, Thing 13

Found Dipity - a timeline creator. This would be useful for middle school students. A creative way to present information. I created an account and bookmarked this on del.icio.us. (My first observation about this site is that I can't seem to remember where the dots go in the name!) - adding in a link to this site at the suggestion of the team. Great idea for keeping track of things you're interested in. http://www.dipity.com/

I like the suggestions for tags. It helps keep you from creating tons of different ones because you forgot what you put something under. I also like the convenience of having the buttons to mark sits you want to keep.

I also like the comments and tags given by others. It gives some sense of the value of the site. In this case, since the people commenting have bookmarked the site, the comments (presumably) would be positive. I've been on many other sites where people give reviews (similar to comments) and the reviews run the gamut, making it hard to
figure out what reality is. I wouldn't give up the ability to read the comments but it's sometimes easy to get so caught up in reading them and trying to evaluate them that you get bogged down.

This could be a valuable tool to use with my students in learning to evaluate websites. As the students research for a topic (especially in teams), they could create their bookmarks and then have teammates comment about their choices, stating their evaluation of them. Teachers could then assess students ability to evaluate the sites by reading the comments. Since the students del.icio.us name is listed, it would help keep inappropriate posting down. The more I think about this, the more I like it!!! I think I'll suggest it to one of the 8th grade history or science teachers for next year. Yippee! Something to make me look cool!!

As a side-note, I started using Google bookmarks lately. It seems to work in a similar fashion although I haven't explored comments or tagging.