Week 6 Thing 13 Del.icio.us!

I love del.icio.us! I first found out about it in early 2007. We had just found out we were to be one of the first Classrooms for the Future schools to get up and running. My coach was counting on me help her with great web sites and I wanted to create an iWeb site for the CFF teachers to go to find them. I was going just a little nuts trying to keep track of all the sites I found considering I was on one of four different computers at any given time - two at home, (my laptop or the kid's computer) and two at school (one in my office, one at the circulation desk). Add to that configuration a Mac installed in my workroom for the iWeb project and I was at my wits' end. My system of consolidating websites consisted of scraps of paper and emails to myself with "cool sites" in the subject line.

Then came a SLJ article in January 2007, that would change everything. In the "All together now" column, Donna DesRoches wrote about social bookmarking and how it could work in classrooms and libraries. I started my first del.icio.us site that day. I showed to our CFF coach and with all that was happening with trainings, etc., we scrapped the iWeb project and concentrated on building a del.icio.us site that all the CFF teachers could access. Both she and I contribute to it and the teachers can if they want to. Not only do our teachers use it, but they have their students access it too.

I have three del.icio.us sites now, one for CFF, one for my library sites, and one for my sites. It's such a great way to share sites with others and doesn't take that much time or effort. I was lucky enough to do the inservice for our librarians last week and was very excited to show them del.icio.us. With their teaching schedules and, in the case of the elementary librarians, their traveling schedules, they don't have time to easily create and maintain a website. When showing them del.icio.us, I stressed how easy it is to create a site for their teachers. They already have great sites bookmarked and they come across more sites all the time. All they have to do is install the "post to del.icio.us" link on their toolbar, tag the sites, and send out a notice to their teachers about the great resources they've gathered for them. They look like heroines when all they did was surf the net.

My del.icio.us sites:
del.icio.us/debsherry
del.icio.us/debsherrylib
del.icio.us/debsherrymine