Managing+Online+Resources

The Internet provides teachers more resources than they have ever had access to before.

But how do you keep track of them?

Portaportal and del.icio.us provide two different approaches to doing just that. Both are online tools for bookmarking sites, but they do it in different ways. Both allow you to access your bookmarks regardless of what computer you are on, as long as you are connected to the Internet.

Portaportal:
Portaportal maintains a straight list of bookmarks, although you can create different categories (like a table). Your list is private and you can password protect it so that only the people (perhaps your students) that you give the password to can access it.

As an example, click [|here] to see one of my student's Portaportals.

Click [|here] to go to Portaportal to sign up for an account or to learn more about Portaportal.

del.icio.us:
Del.icio.us, on the other hand, is a "social bookmarking" tool. When you bookmark a web page to del.icio.us, you assing tags to it. Think of tags a s descriptors, and you can assign as many as you want. In fact, the tags are the secret to the power of del.icio.us. This is because your bookmarks are public - you can find out the web sites that other folks have bookmarked using the same tag and you can see who else has bookmarked the same sites as you.

As an example, here are [|my del.icio.us bookmarks for "DigitalStorytelling]." And here are [|all del.icio.us links for "digitalstorytelling."] See the bookmarks others are linked to?

Click [|here] to go to del.icio.us or [|here] to learn more about it.

Activity:
This activity not only allows you to explore both Portaportal and del.icio.us, but it also give you an opportunity to find some resources that will be useful to a unit you teach students.

Start by setting up both a Portaportal and a del.icio.us account.

Next, spend some time finding some resources for your unit and then post the good ones both to Portaportal and to del.icio.us.

Why both? So you can get a feel for the differences between working in both.

Helpful hints:
When working in Portaportal, it helps to think about what catagories you think the links might fall into before you start posting. It can be messy to reorganize links later.

When working in del.icio.us, it helps to use lots of tags. Don't think of them as categories (where you might only assign one per link), but instead, think of them as descriptors (and you can assign many!)