Thing #1 - Part B: Using Delicious

This is the Second Part of Thing #1 on using Delicious for storing and organizing bookmarks.

Delicious is a very useful resource for saving bookmarks, especially for people who use multiple computers or for those who want to share specific web links with others. Having your Internet favorites and links stored on-line allows you to access them quickly from any computer around the world. The other nice thing about Delicious is that you can neatly organize your favorites into folders. Delicious is very user friendly and easy to learn. Delicious will allow me to put websites online for my students to easily access. If I want my students to visit several websites of choice while doing research on a specific topic, I could put all of these sites in a folder in Delicious and then I could have my students access them quickly from any computer within the lab. This will save a lot of trouble of emailing the links to the students.

http://www.delicious.com/gvbzone

Click the screen shot above or the link to visit my personal delicious page. Before I knew about Delicious, I spent a lot of time to make my own personal website homepage to store my links:
http://missions.redemptivehistory.org/vbhomepage/myindex.html
Now that I know about Delicious, such a web page is no longer needed.

The Marzano teaching and learning strategies that are applied while students visit websites listed on my Delicious page or when they set up their own Delicious page are the following:
Marzano 9:
2 - Summarizing and Note-Taking
7 - Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
9 - Utilizing Questions, Cues, and Advanced Organizers

Thing #1 - Windows Shortcuts

Microsoft Windows has a lot of keyboard shortcuts that many people do not know about. Some of the shortcuts are very useful and make editing documents a whole lot quicker. Although I have used Ctrl C and Ctrl V for copy and paste for as long as I can remember, many of these other shortcuts were new to me. Below is a screen shot of the article that I was editing. I captured a video demonstrating some of the shortcuts which you can watch by clicking on the screen shot below.

http://www.screencast.com/t/A4O0oJVdMhmd

Knowing about these links is both helpful for myself and my students. Since my students are frequently in my school's computer lab writing papers, making PowerPoints, etc., they will benefit by knowing these shortcuts. These shortcuts will help save time and prevent possible frustration. Students who accidentally delete things will benefit by knowing they can undo their work.

Below I've listed a few reflections on specific shortcuts that I think are the most useful:

Ctrl Z - This shortcut allows a person to quickly undo something. I found that it also works in the Internet Explorer address bar. This is very helpful for when you accidentally delete something that you didn't intend. I also like to experiment in Microsoft Word with changing fonts, etc. and Ctrl Z allows me to undo a change when I don't like it.

Ctrl F - This allows a person to quickly search for a word or phrase within a document or web page. I did not know there was such an easy way to do this. Often I have had to slowly scroll over a large web page article to find a specific section, but now this short cut allows me to quickly search for keywords directly within a page. I like this better than the Google Toolbar which I used to use for the same purpose of directly searching the content of specific page.

Ctrl A - Another useful shortcut that allows you to quickly highlight the text of an entire article. I find this very helpful since I often want to copy the entire text of a web page into a MS Word document. This speeds up the process significantly.

Overall, these shortcuts will benefit me as an educator to be more efficient in preparing lessons and in performing presentations within the classroom on an LCD projector. Most of all, my students will be glad to know these shortcuts for their own personal benefit in using Microsoft products.

The Marzano teaching and learning strategies that are addressed while students learn and apply these shortcuts are listed below:
Marzano 9:
2 - Summarizing and Note-Taking
7 - Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
9 - Utilizing Questions, Cues, and Advanced Organizers

21 Things - Getting Started

This is my first day of class. I'm in a technology course entitled 21 Things for the 21st Century Educator. I'm excited about it already. I hope to learn how to better use technology in the classroom. My teacher seems to know a lot so I'll think I'll be learning many new things... at least 21 or more. Check back to find out more about all the 21 Things that this class has to offer.