Sign up for an account at http://del.icio.us to organize your bookmarks. Then (if you’re using Firefox), get the del.icio.us Firefox extension.

Now a little on what these are.

The del.icio.us site and Firefox extension allow you to tag pages as you view them on the web. Think of it as a bookmark on steroids. First of all, you can get at the bookmarks anywhere rather than from the computer you saved the bookmark on. Second of all, you get an easy web address to share with students, so you can direct them to websites easily.

Try it. Visit my Turkish del.icio.us test page.

I imagine several important ways del.icio.us can be useful in the classroom:

  1. Guided web research. When I supply the links, students can find good information (or the info I want them to read) quickly.
  2. Web inquiries. The Turkey example above illustrates what I mean: each tagged page is accompanied by a question I want students to answer on that page.
  3. Sharing group work. If students and teachers alike have del.icio.us accounts, you can have students post tagged pages to you with the “for:” feature.