• del.icio.us now redirects to delicious.com Whew! Glad those periods are gone from the middle of the name. It was awkward to say, remember, and type. Now that problem is gone.
• Searching is much more dynamic. When you search your own, or someone else’s bookmarks, there are many more ways to search in a more robust way.
• Tags are more robust, as well.
• There are many other changes, but none that will be disruptive to those just getting started.

In short, those that use delicious frequently will be able to benefit from the changes most, and just do what they’ve been doing at a much higher level.

Wes Fryer blogs about the redesign here. Thanks to him for drawing my attention to it.

Delicious has a “What’s New On Delicious” page, which explains things pretty well.

They also have a blog entry of their own to lay out what the changes are, as well. It has a brief video which may be great for those of you who don’t want to read a bunch of text. But watch closely, because it does fast, as they demonstrate the differences, rather than show a bunch of PowerPoint-esque slides to communicate each point.

Here are my previous blog articles about delicious.

Elementary Math, Ancient Greece-6th Grade, Biomes-6th Grade, and Ancient China-6th Grade

These are groups of websites I’ve put together. When you go to any of the above web pages, you get a Google Search Engine that will use all of Google’s power to search ONLY THOSE SITES!

The advantage of using this is that you can use keyword searches to search several websites at once. Many websites have a database (aka: a search box where you can put in your search terms) that allow you to search their site very easily. One of the best sites, which has one of the cleanest interfaces of all the math sites I’ve seen is the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives. But it doesn’t have everything you might want if you’re searching for a good website to use to help you teach math. There are other sites that have a database of their own. The Google Custom Search Engine tool allows you to search all of them at once! It will even include, of course, web sites that don’t have a search box of their own.

I’m excited about this because I can send my students to these search pages and actually teach the concept and skill of performing good keyword searches, rather than sending them to just a list of links to try out, one by one. In the case of the Elementary Math Custom Search, I’m intending to allow other educators to search all of these sites at once.

Another very powerful feature of this tool is that sites can be contributed by up to 100 people!!! I invite anyone reading this who finds a great math website that you think should be part of this group of sites in this Custom Search, please send it to me. I can officially invite you through the Google page where I created the Custom Search, too..

Now, how is this different from http://del.icio.us/ ? This is another tool that I have also jumped into in a big way. I’ve been using my account consistently for quite a while now: http://del.icio.us/wark. I’ve also put a lot of math-specific sites together at this account: http://del.icio.us/math34

With Delicious, you can:

• Tag sites with categories you make up, that might or might not be words that show up when Google searches their titles, URLs, or text of the pages
• Give a quick notation to the sites you’re making public
• Put sites into categories (by the tags you make) for someone who doesn’t know what they’re looking for (and thus wouldn’t know what search terms to enter)
• Search your own (delicious) bookmarks, or all the bookmarks of all delicious users. Because of this feature, I initially thought that these two tools might not be all that different. At first, I thought…so why do this, if I can search delicious, too?

With Google Custom Search, you can

• Unleash Google’s powerful search algorithms to search through all of the sites you include
• Invite others to contribute
• Send people to your Google Custom Search in lots of ways. One is with simple links, as in the links above. Here’s another, like I’ve done with my class website. You can search right from your own website!

At the “World Café” event put on by CTAP 7 the other night, Alan November showed us a tool that has me thinking. It’s the ability to set up your own search engine…sort of. It’s called Google Custom Search Engine.

You choose the sites that should be in the bank of websites that it will search. Others can collaborate in assembling those sites. People can go to your search page, put in whatever search terms they want, and it will use the Google search algorithms to search within those pages.

How does a teacher decide which to use? You’d have to really be clear about:

• who would be using your tool (delicious page or Google Custom Search)
• what the purpose would be
• and other factors

I’ll have to get my hands dirty with Google Custom Search, and do a more thorough analysis on the idea of which tool would be best for which situation…

Basically, geocaching is a big treasure-hunting game that people with GPS devices play with each other. A cache is hidden somewhere, and the hide-er makes note of the GPS coordinates (latitude & longitude), gives a creative name and description, and logs it on a site like geocaching.com. There might be some trinkets in the cache (you’re encouraged to take something, and leave something), but there’s always a log book. You’re supposed to sign the log book, and hide it back where you found it. Then, you go back to geocaching.com and log your find. This way, your profile shows all the caches you’ve found, and others looking for that cache later can see the logs, as well. As geocachers interact with each other in this way, a community if built. For instance, we have found several caches hidden by “The Plunketts”, and we’ve gotten familiar with their style.

“Muggles,” named after people without magical abilities in the Harry Potter books, are those that don’t know about geocaching. In the case of urban caches, where there would be the potential for someone unaware of the whole concept to destroy, move, throw away, or otherwise sabotage the cache, being aware of muggles is verrrrry important. In fact, one cache that caused us significant difficulty was placed in an area where there was a security guard!

I must admit, I wouldn’t be much of a ‘cacher if I was alone. My wife and I ‘cache under the name “orangewormz.” We got the idea from the fact that we both like Apple computers (and worms like Apples – hence the “worm” part), and my wife has red hair (which is more orange -y than red – hence the “orange” part). Then, we wanted to spell it a nifty way, so we changed the “s” to a “z”.

So what does all this have to do with education? How can this be used in the classroom (actually, outside the classrom, but you know what I mean!)? I’ve been racking my brain to come up with good answers to that question. After trying to come up with some answers to that question, and writing several ideas for different subject areas, it became apparent that it deserved its own posting!

In planning for this workshop, it occured to me that in order to pass along everything that I would want to pass along to those who come, I would have to give out more than one URL. My goal is certainly to simplify and streamline the tool that I use to provide this kind of content, but for now, a quick solution is to put all 3 locations of my favorite Math links right here in a blog article…

Here’s my first attempt at creating a serious website. Making the pop-up menus gave me the biggest sense of satisfaction on this project, besides actually having a purpose for putting a website together. However, this website is sooooo 20th century! I built it from a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get). Specifically, I used Adobe GoLive – not a bad program. However, I now prefer other methods & tools. This is the math page. From it, you can click to lots of other pages with content in other categories.

Here’s my main del.icio.us page (http://del.icio.us/wark).
This link directs you to the links I’ve tagged “math.” (http://del.icio.us/wark/math)
If you don’t know what that is, read about it in a previous blog article here. As you can see, this del.icio.us account is the place where I put anything that I think is worth sharing. The tags are all over the place: web2.0, funny, volcanoes, pi, kite, home fix-it, etc. Some tags have lots of websites to share, and others only have one or two.

Here’s my math34 del.icio.us page (http://del.icio.us/math34).
I designed it with only math in mind. I specifically used the bundles (folders) to help categorize the links into the chapters in my school’s math textbook, and into the the strands of the math standards in California.

I’d be interested in any feedback from anyone to how useful (or not) these two del.icio.us accounts are to you….

Here’s HOW to get started: Get a free account and put the “post to del.icio.us” link on your bookmarks bar. Then, when you’re surfing the web, and come across a site you want to save, click the “post to del.icio.us” bookmark, and you will be able to “tag” the site with whatever words you want to categorize this site with.

Here’s WHY you should get started: Most of you reading this are probably in some sort of leadership position among your colleagues, whether formally or informally. Instead of having to send people a list of URL’s in an email when you want to share something with them, you can keep adding URL’s to your del.icio.us account, and then send a single URL when the time comes to share. For example, if I want to give someone some sites about blogging in the classroom, I can just give them this URL: http://del.icio.us/wark/Blogging101/, and they can access a whole list of sites that I recommend for this category, or on my entire account (http://del.icio.us/wark). They will also be able to see which sites you add to that category later. (You can also save sites as private, in case you only want to access them yourself, and not share them with the world.)
Another example is one that I have created a del.icio.us account specifically for sharing websites to assist 6th grade math teachers (http://del.icio.us/math34/). I have also tagged sites on this account to align with the chapters in the McDougal-Littel math textbook. Part of the reason for creating a separate account has to do with “bundles”, which are kind of like folders for bookmarks, but that’s for another article. I have discussed this, other tech tips, and other topics on my blog (http://ewarkentin.edublogs.org/). Go there to learn more about recommending sites for others’ del.icio.us accounts, to learn about putting sites into bundles, and to leave comments about tips that you discover beyond what I’ve described here!

For even more information on social bookmarking, I recommend Will Richardson’s book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting, and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.