Week 2 (January 12/18, 2014)

I was introduced to a bunch of bookmarking websites the other day. Diigo, Pearltree  and Symbaloo were the main ones. With Diigo it is great to be able to connect so quickly to many different topics all from the same website and it would make it easier for students in a class to help them on research projects. It does seem like it would be most beneficial for a High School class and possibly the upper Middel School grades just because I don't think the work that goes into it would be worth it unless the students are able to use the sites often.

The bookmarking website I liked the most was Symbaloo. I had a very clean and easy to understand design. It uses a bunch of boxes that can be customized in colour, location and most importantly, the website they connect to. Even just looking at the sample on the Symbaloo main page it shows how many useful websites can be at your fingertips ... or mouse clicks, that is. Google, Encyclopedia, Translate, News, CBC, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, the time, weather and maps are all websites one-click away from a Symbaloo custom page. Another nice thing about Symbaloo is you can make different tabs that are public or private so you could have your own with websites like eBay, E-Mail and Facebook and another for students in your classroom.

I think Symbaloo would be useful, as I said, in an upper Middle Years classroom or High School because those students will benefit from being made aware of or reminded of all the great resources the Internet has to offer. Of course, there is a good and bad side to the Internet and not every information website can be trusted. So one very good use for Symbaloo would be to create a page with all the appropriate researching websites that students can try when they are first starting to do research projects. This type of site is really the best way I could see giving students an opportunity to try different sites without all having to look at the exact same ones but still within some boundaries. Now that I am aware of these bookmarking websites I will be more aware, going forward, about what type of websites would be useful for students and how a bookmarking website might help make it easier for the students to understand and access them.

I do continue to see a huge benefit to being able to use sites like YouTube in the classroom. I am using that as a short introduction so I can post a YouTube video here as well as experiment with embedding video in my blog.

The video below is HD video on Protists which I showed the students in the classroom I taught in for the Living Things unit. The respond from the students was great and they really enjoyed the music and visuals of the video. It was a great way make Protists more interesting to Middle Years students who won't always find the topic exciting just from the mention of it. Anyway, without further ado, here is the video: