Just saw this on Twitter, a social bookmarking site just for educators. It might be a good way to introduce students to social bookmarking. Looks like the content is reviewed before being posted, as not all posters have 100% of their submissions published. It's a new service and needs support, so check it out and see if it would be useful for you.
The biggest drawback - it's K12. Why does everyone think only kids are learning to read and do math? I found an amazing site on Edutagger, ESL-Kids. Unfortunately, yet again it's designed for kids, but it's free and has a worksheet function that lets you pick a topic, generate a random word list or select your own, and then choose from 18 different worksheets. It's very low level, for example some worksheets are for tracing or copying the letters, but this could work for non-literate students and those from other alphabets. Musical instruments has a nice selection of words, and so does weather. Worth checking out for beginning low ESL.
2 comments:
Thanks for the link and feedback Marian. I am the owner/developer, and to give you a little background, Edutagger is designed to work as a social bookmarking service, but resembles Digg more than say del.icio.us. One of the issues i've always had with Digg and del.icio.us is that it's very hard to find resources related to education. I use this example a lot, but the tag "games" could lead to a lot of irrelevant links in general social bookmarking sites, but on Edutagger the relevancy is clearer.
It actually started out as a general educational social bookmarking site, but I found that I needed to specialise towards K-12 as we were running into some of the issues explained above (although not as major).
As you said it does need support as it is very new, and having something that is too general will not encourage as many people to sign up. However, there are a lot of resources on there that can be used across a wider spectrum, and are not necessarily limited to K-12.
In addition, it is still possible to tag articles with keywords such as "tertiary" or "adult learning", as many of these resources could still be appropriate to the upper levels of K-12. If Edutagger continues to grow, I expect it will be easier to create additional categories that would support adult learning.
It would be fantastic if those reading this signed up and "edutagged" some links they find useful, and even shared Edutagger with their colleagues in the educational community.
I'd love to hear any feedback, but i'm not sure if this is the right place for it. If you need to contact me open up the contact form on Edutagger and drop me a line, i'd love to hear from you.
Mark
One additional thing I forgot to mention. All submissions are accepted, but they will only appear on the front page after they have been tagged by multiple people. The idea here is that the "higher quality" links are promoted, and users are given a more filtered and refined list (essentially saving time). Users are encouraged to "edutag" any links in the "Upcoming" section to promote those to the front page.
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