Getting your Internet files organized...

First things first, find a tool that works for you to organize your Internet favorites/bookmarks.  I highly recommend using a cloud bookmarking site such as Delicious or Diigo, as then you can access your bookmarks from anywhere.  I was pretty good with my Diigo account when I set it up last summer, but ran into some connectivity issues at school, and got lazy about updating Diigo when I got home.  I regret that now as my work computer is sick and I can not access my bookmarks.  However, I did export a saved list of my bookmarks about once a month, so all is not lost.    It's quite simple to do, and here is a step-by-step guide for exporting favorites from Internet Explorer (not my favorite browser, but the one that works best at work).  Here's the step-by-step guide for exporting bookmarks from Firefox.  When backing up your computer, always remember to back-up four bookmarks too!  Here is an article on some other suggestions for backing up your information on the cloud.  I hadn't heard of skloog  before, but it reminds me of a site I use with students, so I may try skloog for sharing sites with teachers and parents this year.

Ok, so now that you are set with a method of saving items pertinent to you, what are some tools that are good for sharing items with students?

 

My favorite site was introduced to me at a conference last summer Sqworl.  The reason why I find this so helpful is because it also attaches a thumbnail view of the page and a short description of the site.  Sometimes I use the description area simply to tell a little about the site, other times I use it to give the students directions before using the site.  You can create folders of related bookmarks that can be edited at any time.  They will give you a URL that you can then share out to any interested parties.  This could be a great way to post a link of related websites for your units of focus on your classroom homepage or in a newsletter to parents.  Rather than typing in all of the URLs you found useful, you just need to include one.

Another two sites I find particularly helpful are tinyurl  and fur.ly.  I know there are similar sites to these out there, but these are the first to which I was introduced.  Tinyurl is an excellent tool for shortening long URLs.  For example, I read an article this morning on using Twitter that I would like to share with my staff.  Rather than giving them this site http://adaptivelearnin.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/1-year-later-why-teachers-should-join-twitter-what-i-have-learned-as-a-twitter-newbie/, I can instead just give them http://tinyurl.com/9vmv7kh  or I could re-name the site to something that let's them know where they are going, such as http://tinyurl.com/y-use-twitter.  All three will bring you to the same spot, but require less typing.  This is especially helpful when you are trying to set-up 20-30 laptops.  If you have younger students and you have to type the address, you can make it something short and sweet that you will easily remember and not have to reference for each computer.  If it is something the students are typing, make it short and easy to spell so they are less likely to have a tracking error.  If there is a site you want to name, but all options for giving the url a specific short name have been previously used on tinyurl, here is a list of similar websites that shorten URLs.

 

Fur.ly I found especially helpful when doing research projects.  This website allows you to access many URLs simultaneously.  So rather than telling students go here, then type in this address, then type in this third address, you can give them all three addresses at once.  Fur.ly will open a new tool bar at the top of their screen to navigate back and forth through the pages as needed.  I also found this site extremely helpful with my kindergarten classes.  It allowed us to do many small lessons without a lot of down time where they needed to wait for the new URL to be entered into their computer (or entered into the teachers computer and be sent using a program such as Net Op).  Just as a note of warning, sometimes highly interactive websites caused the fur.ly toolbar to disappear, which means you just need to type the address in (which on most school computers automatically gets saved in recent searches).


I would recommend teaching your students how to save and access items in favorites/bookmarks when you send them a new site (be it on its own or a grouped site), that way they can access it later.  You can also save frequently accessed sites right on the desktop (helpful for the beginning of the year with the youngest computer users).  Do this by simply dragging the icon from the address bar onto your desktop.