Week Six - Thing # 13

I spent the afternoon exploring Del.icio.us. The tutorial by the Santa Cruz Public Library helped get me started. As a side note, as I have worked on the 23 Things I have noticed how often YouTube is used for video tutorials. This site is blocked in my district. I understand why it is blocked but I wish there was a solution to using the best of YouTube and blocking the worst of it.
Del.icio.us has great potential as a tool for research in the library, and perhaps students would use it because it is associated with the web and not the library. We have great material already available on our library website but most students prefer to use Google and Yahoo. Using Del.icio.us would make it easier to link news articles with student assignments. It also could be used for specific classes and assignments. Having a Del.iou.us account for the library would be a way to teach students new ways to find better material for their papers rather than settling for what Google and Yahoo throws out in gigantic and not necessarily accurate numbers. This would also give students and teachers the opportunity to interact with the material by posting to the account. I plan to try this in some format with my bookclub this year. Rather than meet every week, one of the weeks will be online.