Delicious - Bundles and Tagging

This is a guest post by my teaching partner Chantelle Davies.  Together we are exploring the use of 21st Century Technology in the classroom.  Thanks Chantelle, for exploring the use of Delicous within our school setting.

Click for photo source.

For about a year now I have been using Evernote as a bookmarking and catalog tool.  Recently Ray and I start using Delicious as another bookmarking tool.  I thought maybe this would have a separate use in addition to using Evernote.

Because Delicious catalogs the sites you save as a list, we thought this might make for a great thing to share on our classroom blogs.  I created an account that Ray and I could share that would be related to our curriculum.  This way we could keep a list of resources that students could use to enhance their learning.  I like that Delicious automatically suggest a variety of tags  that you could use from scanning the site you are saving; something that Evernote does not do.  It is also nice that you can bundle tags to pull up a group of items.  However, what wasn't ideal was that there was  no way of filtering the tags I didn't want to show.  For example, I was hoping that we could share with our students the bundle I created with tags; science, grade 5, structures, forces, student resource.  Unfortunately, a number of my sites tagged as "teacher resource"  also came up in the bundle because they also had tags such as science, forces, structures, grade 5, etc.  This could pose a challenge if you had bookmarked sites you wanted to save for your own reference only, such as lesson and test ideas.

I prefer Evernote for my personal cataloging because it will scan images for text as well as documents and webpages, and having to come up with my own tags is only a minor inconvenience.  I think I will continue to use Evernote for myself and I will continue to explore Delicious for student use.  Perhaps I'll have to limit it to only things I want students to have access to (too bad for the purposes of sharing resources with Ray).

Finally, the other challenge I had was finding a way to put a delicious widget onto my blog.  According to some forums I read, Wordpress once had a dedicated widget, but it appears they no longer do.  I can't find a way to get the HTML code for a widget from Delicious to add a text based widget.  Any suggestion are welcome.  For now, here is the link to our bundle of resources.

https://delicious.com/daviesswinarc/tag_bundle/Grade%205%20Forces%20Acting%20on%20Structures