Tag Archives: Delicious

Influencing Policy Part 2: Becta-X: Old Conversations, New Connections, Bright Future?

Leave a reply

I was honoured to be invited to Becta-X (the x stands for exchange) during the Easter break.  The conference brought together 75 leading educators and 75 leading people from the Media sector.  Thanks to @TomBarrett for getting me the invite – truly much appreciated.

The aims of the day were:

The way the digital media industry influences young people is both a threat and a real opportunity to education. As part of its “Fit for the Future” programme Becta has asked Just-b. Productions to independently bring together thinkers and doers from both these two worlds

We hope this participatory and distributed forum will break down walls between these two sectors, between big and small, between speaker and delegate, between real and remote participants and create fresh thinking on all sides.

I’ll not describe the entire order of events, if you want the details or indeed just the perspectives of others then please have a skim through some of these posts from other educators who were in attendance:

Fred Garnett / Tom Barrett / Doug Belshaw / Dai Barnes / Kristian Still / Nicola McNee / Ewan McIntosh

As you will see from those posts there was some discussion and reflection afterwards as to how much of a success the event was.  My 2-cents worth: Continue reading →

Surfing the wave – How I filter MY Web

1 Reply
The best bits of MY web (Image by Niffty on Flickr)

The Internet I love (Image by Niffty on Flickr)

Inspired by Simon Job, this is a post about how I surf the torrential tidal wave of information that is out there on the Internet, how I filter it down into a manageable stream to consume and how I save the best bits for later.

I have been using Google Reader for the last 3 years or so to read the latest updates from my favourite websites and blogs.  I have just spent about the last 4 hours tidying up my list of 400+ websites which I follow after reading an article on Lifehacker about how to declutter and streamline you google reader inbox.

I hope there are some useful tips about Google Reader, Delicious & Instapaper for newcomers to rss, and to old timers with a bulging reader like myself.

I’ve split this little guide into three sections:

  1. How I read just the best bits of the Web that I want, filtering out the noise.
  2. How I save the best bits to read later or for future reference.
  3. How I find retrieve my archived information.

I’d be fascinated to hear how you filter the Web to your liking, and whether any of this was of use to you :)

Simon Job has created a great little graphic to explain this process:

Using The Web

Using The Web

Continue reading →

Sharing Resources

9 Replies

Like most teachers I have collected masses of resources over the years and created masses more.  Lots of my resources which I believe to be free of copyright are stored online and catalogued with the excellent www.delicious.com.

As I’m sure most readers are aware Delicious.com is a great social bookmarking website.  It’s a place to save all of your bookmarks online, so that they are accessible from any computer with an Internet connection.  If you’re new to Delicious then this Common Craft video sums it up best:

[youtube x66lV7GOcNU]

I have tagged numerous web based resources along with the specific urls of lots of Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Activstudio files.  The files are all stored on the excellent www.getdropbox.com.

Dropbox gives you 2Gb of free online storage space.  Dropbox works best when you install the client on your computer (Windows/Mac/Linux compatible).  The installer creates a ‘My Dropbox’ folder on your computer.  Anything that you store in this folder is automatically replicated on the Web and on any other machine you install Dropbox on.  This makes it great for synchronising files between different machines.

I have stored all of the resources that I want to share in the ‘Public’ Dropbox folder, this one is viewable by all.

To catalogue a file in Delicious, go to the file, click ‘Copy Public url’ and paste this into a new bookmark on Delicious.

Dropbox Copy url

Dropbox Copy url

Delicious.com save new bookmark

Delicious.com save new bookmark

This bookmark is then tagged with as many descriptive words as possible.

These bookmarks include numerous pdf files from the National Strategies site which I have cut up into manageable parts.  I hope that the National Strategies are happy with this educational use of their, at times, excellent resources.  If any person feels I am sharing material to which they own copyright, or who would like full credit given, please contact me and I will amend it to your wishes immediately.

I have included the tag msow in all of my bookmarks.  I did this as I wanted to be able to differentiate these as bookmarks for teaching purposes (msow originally stood for ‘maths scheme of work’ as there are Delicious links at the bottom of each page of my online scheme of work).

If there are other Maths teachers out there with existing Delicious accounts can I suggest we all agree on a  common tag such as this?  It would make searching for resources more focussed.  A search for ‘Data‘ brings up too many links unsuitable for teaching, but one for ‘Data+msow‘ would just bring up ours.

So if you’d like to join my network, follow the link below.  If you’d like to follow the idea of a common tag for Maths teaching resources then please leave a comment.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]