I am very pleased to have three new online resources/tools in my arsenal: Delicious, Google Reader, and Library Thing. All three of these web services help users to be more efficient and organized. Delicious organizes bookmarks; Google Reader organizes RSS feeds; and Library Thing organizes books in an online catalog. All of these sites are also social services that allow users to browse and find recommendation from other users.
I now have my own profile on Delicious, a "social bookmarking" service that allows users to save, organize, and search for website bookmarks. I love Delicious because I can now access my bookmarks from any computer, not just my MacBook. It was very simple to import my bookmarks to Delicious, and it is interesting to see how many other Delicious users have also saved the same bookmarks. I also found several new bookmarks to add to my personal education stack by searching under the tag "lesson plans"and browsing through the most popular websites under this tag.
Google Reader is another online tool for saving, organizing, and browsing websites of interest. Google Reader uses RSS to quickly display the lastest feeds for websites to which users have subscribed. Often when I get online, I go through a mental checklist of several blogs I follow by my favorite authors. Because I did not want to crowd my bookmark toolbar, I would manually type in the URL for each blog when I wanted to check for updates. Now that I have a Google Reader account and have subscribed to all of the blogs I follow, I can just go to Google Reader to quickly scan all of the lastest feeds without having to look at the websites one by one. I am excited about my new Google Reader account because I think that it will help me to more quickly and effciently keep up with my favorite authors' blogs.
Library Thing is another online service I am very excited to discover. Library Thing allows members to organize their book collections into a detailed online catalog. I love that I can view the tags, rommended books, and reviews for all of the books I add in my library. Library Thing also allows members to organize their books in categories such as "to Read," "Currently Reading, and "Read but Unowned." I have already set up an account and have begun the on-going process of cataloging the books I own in my personal library. In the future, I can envision having two separate accounts on Library Thing: one account for my personal at-home library and one account for my classroom library. Because I will be an English language arts teacher, I hope to have a very large classroom library, and Library Thing could be a great help in organizing and keeping track of my collection. I like that students could "check out" books from my library by recording "Out" and their names in the tag field of the books. I believe Library Thing will be a very valuable online resource for me in the years to come.
I am very excited about my new accounts/profiles on each of these online service websites, and I look forward to using them further.
Excellent!
ReplyDeleteThank you. :-)