Playing Tag

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Let's face it, many of the things educators learn these days are done on the fly, squashed in between lesson planning and marking. Done in a just-ahead-of-time way to use in class with students the next day. There's a price to pay for this kind of learning, one that I am dealing with this week as I attempt to tidy up my online bookmarks in delicious.

By some standards I have a great many bookmarks. As more of the resources I direct students and teachers to become available online my list of bookmarks grows. This week I began some spring cleaning by weeding out similar tags. For example, I'll keep resource and delete resources.

In workshops I explain tags as similar to the words one would see in the index of a book. Some people recommend using as many tags as possible, others say fewer are better. As I look at the way I've used tags I think I've come up with a better plan for tagging, keeping in mind how I will search for the links later.

- use subject tags like English or Socials
- consider the type of information: resource, tutorial, howto
- use all singular or all plural tagging: tutorial or tutorials
- add the author's or creator's name if there is one
- decide how to deal with multiple word tags, some popular ones are the hyphen, underscore, forward slash or period. I'm tending towards using the period: copyright.friendly

When I recently searched for some examples of how blogs are used in English classes I used these two standard tags: blog, english and added in other tags as needed: poetry, guidelines, commenting, writing etc.

So there you have it, some of my simple rules for making sense of my delicious tags. If you need me, I'll be slogging through my tags, cleaning them up and wishing I'd had these guidelines in mind when I started tagging.

Some resources for learning about delicious:

Finding other educators who use delicious in the Delicious4Teachers wiki. Add your name to this wiki.

Firefox Add-on for using delicious.

Chris Betcher's "I Like Delicious Things" from the k12 online conference.

The Delicious Blog has great tips and tricks.

From YouTube "Getting Started With Delicious"