I think that collaboration is very important both in school and in life; Collaboration helps to connect ideas and expand knowledge. I feel that the social web is a great medium for collaboration to really flurish among people. One such collaboration medium is Twitter. I have heard about Twitter before, but I never used it; I never felt that Twitter was an application that would be of real use for me. Now that I have read more about how Twitter can be used in an educational setting, I have a greater understanding of why people use Twitter, but I still do not think that I would use Twitter. Twitter, to me, sounds like more of a hassle than a blessing. I think that teachers can connect through other mediums that they are already using, whether it be blogs, wikis, or delicious accounts, I do not think that teachers would also need to have a Twitter account (unless of course a teacher finds that they really enjoy using Twitter and it would save them time to connect with others). I am not trying to say that Twitter is a bad application, but I feel that for me personally Twitter would not be an effective tool to use.
I really like social bookmarking services, such as delicious. Before taking this class I had never heard of a social bookmarking site; Now that I have a Delicious account, I find myself adding tons of bookmarks that I find. It is a great resource because you can access it from any computer anywhere in the world. It is also a great resource because you can find additional information that pertains to what you are interested in, through the use of tags. The other day I added Starfall to my Delicious account (my nieces Donna and Lucia love this site) and after adding this site, it showed that almost 19,000 other people have also bookmarked it; Clearly this must be a very good site, I certainly think so. I then clicked through some other sites that were similar to Starfall, and I ended up finding a ton of other great websites for young children to help them learn to read. By looking at other peoples tags I have also found tons of educational websites that I have saved for future reference. I am finding that my Delicious account is very useful! There was a lot of emphasis in this chapter placed on using Diigo, but I feel that Delicious is more of my style of social bookmarking, because it is so easy to use. I think that for someone who wants to annotate, highlight, and make notes on a site, Diigo would be more for them; For me, I am at a place where I only care to save websites and get links to other relevant websites, so Delicious works.
As a teacher, I do not think that I would use Twitter in my classroom, however, I would definitely be using a blog in my classroom. I think that I would encourage my students to have delicious accounts, since I find it to be a great personal website. I would consider having my students link their delicious accounts to me somehow so that I could tag items for them, but I do not think that I would go as in depth with delicious as the text described. As I said earlier, I think that delicious is a great tool, but I just do not think that it would be something that I could use in an elementary classroom (perhaps I could use it if I taught 8th grade).
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