Saturday, February 14, 2009
Can Social Tagging Make Teacher's Lives Easier and How?
In order to take full advantage of social tagging, I will have to learn to give up my addiction to google.com. When learning about social tagging, I must admit my immediate response was “Um, whatever subject I want to research I type it into Google and hit enter”. Why would I need to tag the hottest travel sites, the hottest education sites when Google tells me what they are; or does it? I love the Internet and technology, but have maybe five websites that I visit repeatedly. Since this isn’t a large number I can remember the names of them. This is another reason a site like delicious and the idea of social tagging can be confusing. I feel pressure to collect more interesting websites. I do have a feeling that as I become a more seasoned teacher I will have more web sites that I favor. This is the question. Can tagging really do what technology should do? Can tagging make teachers lives easier and more organized or is it an added dose of confusion. If the easier part is true then I believe that tagging can also make students lives easier? I am wondering what others think?
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I also feel as though I have an addiction to Google.com and use it nearly everyday. However, the more I read about social tagging and the more I experience it, I think it will be easy to apply to a classroom setting. Perhaps it will take actual classroom application for you and I to discover the advantages social tagging offers to the classroom.
ReplyDeleteI think that tagging makes things easier because instead of doing all the searching yourself, you can steal links from others. This way, you are reaping the benefits of someone else's work!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Laura, it is much easier "reaping the benefits of someone else's work." If that person bookmarked it, then it was probably extremely helpful and they wanted to share it with others.
ReplyDeleteI think that it can make your life easier as long as you are using it correctly. The only thing that I can see as making social tagging tough in the classroom is trying to filter what your students will be exposed to. That may make social tagging a headache.
ReplyDeleteI think that social tagging can make a teacher's job a lot easier when trying to research certain information for the classroom. I really think that the amount of information available online is for everyone to read and we are not "reaping the benefits for someone else's work". If they did not want to share the information, then do not post it to a website.
ReplyDeleteI am totally with you on this one. I too prefer to just google something. But for me, the nice part about Delicious has been the fact that all I have to do is click on this bar I have that has all the websites I have bookmarked and it goes right to them.
ReplyDeleteI have been an art teacher now for almost 8 years. When I started teaching, I wasn't even using websites because there was no need for me. I got lessons from other teachers, school, or made them up myself. I was still using slides to show images. However, as the years have gone by, I have begun to use the internet more frequently to search for lessons or whatever pertains to the lesson I am teaching at the time. It's great. And I love the Steve Museum sight. That is like an art teacher's dream. (Well, at least part of the dream :p )
It's not something to make life more efficient, no. A good deal of technology is like that. However, although social tagging does end up taking up more of one's time, I've found that it returns on the investment in the long term. I can't tell you how many times I've followed someone's tag to something that was really pertinent to what I was studying.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, Google is a big engine, working huge parameters all the time. It's only ever going to give you most traffic-ed pages. Social bookmarking breaks it down because the users have already sorted and classified the pages.