Chapter 6 Blogs Wikis Podcasts

This chapter starts out by talking about the social web. According to this “social web” we all have many friends out there just waiting to be found and connected to, and those friends have other friends who can just as easily connect with us and point us to new and interesting information or learning. So basically the internet has millions of users and most of these users can be contacted and will help us.

Of course if you talk about the social web they have to talk about… Twitter! According to our text this is not only a social network, but also a powerful tool that teachers can use to help their students. Then the book starts to talk about social bookmarking. This is where people can collect links and information on the internet that they find useful and want to use later in the future. All of us in Ed. 331 use a sight called delicious, which fits right into this category. Another sight at the front of bookmarking is called Diigo. The author really really liked this sight because on Diigo the ability to separate your information into categories is much easier. This is a good tool to use to prevent having a huge amount of information and no way to organize it. The rest of the chapter continues to talk about Delicious and Diigo. The author points not only to the awesome tools that both of these sites give us, but also how the tools will make our lives as educators easier.

This reading adds to my continuing change of how to think about technology. As a kid I really thought that twitter was stupid. Who the heck would want to proclaim to the world every little thing that they do every minute of the day. However, this reading talks about some of the benefits that twitter has. It actually can be used in a classroom setting which I think is awesome. I guess twitter can be used for more than I thought. The chapter also talked about using delicious. This is a sight that my professor showed me how to use and I think that it is awesome! As a teacher I am really excited to look up ideas and programs for my lesson plans on my delicious account. This chapter did a good job of continuing to make me a believer in technology. With all the really cool tools that it gives us it awesome.

As a future educator I may use twitter to put up assignments, send reminders, and inform my student’s parents of what is all going on in the classroom. I will for sure use delicious. I really like this site and believe it will make my life so much easier in the future.