Week 4/5 Social Bookmarking

Wow... I am so behind right now.  Just finished putting up Seussical at Belmont High School and it was a great success-- but I have been living in a black hole for several weeks now, and am only just beginning to peek out at the world again.  I sometimes forget how all-consuming it is to direct a show (forget a musical!) and I am definitely a little shell shocked.  My poor son, who has barely seen me in weeks, is still being shooed away as I try to catch up with the rest of my professional life... grading, reading student papers, writing curriculum...  GRAD CLASSES!  Which leads me to where I am now...

Social bookmarking.  Never did it.  Just tried it.  Completely love it.  I am using Diigo and I just started  bookmarking my sites on poetry and poets (I happen to be working on a poetry unit for school right now).  The tag capabilities are so amazingly useful.  I love being able to take notes online and have them accessible wherever I am.  I find as I am tagging my sites that I am actually getting good ideas for my curriculum and my tags are going to make it easier to understand my thought process as I go to put together my plans later.

For someone like me, I think this social bookmarking thing might change my life.  I mean that completely.  I am one of those people who reads like 3-4 different books at once and then reads a cartoon in the New Yorker which connects to one of the readings and then hears a podcast on NPR by the author.... I read and connect and mix it up and then I make all of these projects and lesson plans for my students.  While it is always exciting and dynamic for me to do this, I think it must appear disorganized and even daunting to my students.  By creating public bookmarks which my students can access (I did get approved for the educator Diigo) I will be able to put all my own resources up for my students so they can participate in the conversation.  I am just beginning and I already have such great ideas.

One thing I started that really jumped out at me as helpful was this: As I said, I started bookmarking favorite poetry websites and then an article on one of them caught my attention.  I bookmarked the article (which I might be able to use for another unit so I tagged it as such) and then I found a poem printed by a person mentioned in the article that really underscores what I would like my students to understand in my writing classes.  Then, I tagged both  the poem and the poet (Langston Hughes) as "Harlem Renaissance" which I have often considered as a possible theme for a unit.  So... even though I started out bookmarking just poetry sites, I also found and tagged information that will be useful in other classes/units.  Diigo is already helping me to organize my information so I can find it in all the locations/headings I might need to find it under and... in the process... making me notice the connections I have in my classes between units.  I love this!