Pros:
- It’s great to have access to links anywhere.
- The tags make things somewhat easy to find.
- It’s an easy way to share links with others.
Cons:
- It’s not that user-friendly or visually appealing.
- It’s not as powerful as I would expect in this day and age. (limited features)
Several years ago I started an account when the site was del.icio.us,
but things seem to have changed significantly, and I don’t think that my former
account even exists anymore. So I made a
new account, which was different than in the past.
Today my summary and evaluation are mixed together:
First, I was asked to connect to my facebook account (or twitter) so
that all the links I share will be in the same place. I understand why some people would like this
feature, but since I would like to keep this as a professional account and keep
my facebook for personal use, I chose not to do that. Next, I had to chose from
a rather short list of links to add as my first link, with the knowledge that I
would remove the link later. They were
mostly news stories, but there was a book review, so I chose that (Melanie
Warner’sPandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed
Food Took Over The American Meal).
At this point, I got the option to include comments and tags with this
link, so for practice’s sake I made some tags about book reviews and school
lunches. I’m not sure if this would be
different on another computer (maybe our school filter is changing the
appearance of the site), but the suggested tags—E, b, c, etc…--were very hard
to read, and nothing explained what they meant. I also got the option to make
this link private, which I did.
Lastly, I was asked to install the bookmarklet, and here again is a
time when our school computers might be causing me problems. I needed to “simply” click on the bookmarklet
button and drag it to my bookmark tool bar, which I tried in a variety of ways,
none of which worked. I’ll try it at
home, but so much of my browsing for school-related links happens at school
that this is an inconvenience. I can
still use delicious; it just won’t be as easy as clicking a button will
browsing.
I then filled in a little bit of profile verbiage—the profile space is
not too elaborate—and got the option to add my facebook friends, which I did
not. Returning to the main page, I found a list of suggested links based on my
“interests”, which they must be basing solely
on my book review link because they were all about food. Yes, food is an interest of mine, but I
really want to use the site for other purposes.
So I searched “library” and started adding links that others had shared
with that tag. I found a few things, but
the search yielded far too many results, and most of them were not anything I
needed. Therefore, I started adding the
links that were already in my favorites bar.
Once I added about 10 links, I tried to see if delicious would give me
some better suggested sites.
Unfortunately, now it doesn’t suggest anything, or at least I can’t find a place for those
suggestions. I checked out the Feed tab,
but it just says that I’m not following any profiles yet. Wouldn’t that be a nice place to have a
“Click Here to Find Profiles to Follow” button? But no, nothing like that is provided, and I
can’t even find another spot to find people to follow. I would say I’m more computer savvy than the
average person, even the average teacher, and yet there were still too many
features I couldn’t find. Maybe for my
next tech journal I’ll look at Diigo and see if it is more powerful or user-friendly. To be honest, if I can’t figure it out pretty
easily, I’m not going to send my whole class there.
After my perusal, I still wanted to know if I could organize the
bookmarks into folders, like I can in an internet browser. I tried to find that option or an explanation
in the help section, but I found nothing.
That’s disappointing because I really like having my links grouped in
categories. I did find an option called
Tag Bundles, which allow me to group similar tags together. This is somewhat helpful, but still not very
visually appealing. Along the same
lines, I don’t really like the visual layout of the site—it’s rather
monotonous.
Despite its limited capabilities, there are multiple ways I would use
this site to increase students’ literacy skills:
1.
I could use delicious to connect all the class
or library-related sites that students might need to
access throughout the year.
2.
I could ask students to visit my delicious page
and use the links I selected for research or ask them to evaluate the links I
included.
3.
More powerfully, I would ask them to contribute
their own links either to one class page or to individual pages. They could share resources with other
students and help each other evaluate sources.
This could be used as a digital class bulletin board of helpful links.
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