Looking through these three tools, delicious, google reader, and library thing I have become more excited about doing my research papers...at least as excited as you can be about doing research papers :)
Anyways the first program I looked at was Delicious. It was very interesting all I had to do was sign up and it took me directly to my own page. I was able to create a stack as soon as I signed in. For me it was about Teach For America because that is one website I will be using ALOT in the next few days as I write my research paper about education reform. Then I browsed the related links in the side which were very interesting. There was one stack by someone called nicmaffel about book design that had several different articles about different covers and designs of hundreds of books. This was very intriguing to me...a total bookworm. I also used the search option on delicious and just searched the word literature and it came up with 154,459 results! I could have spent a very long time looking through all these but in the press for time I didn't. However, when I have spare time it's amazing to me all that I will be able to read about using this tool.
The second "keeper" program I looked at was RSS or Google Reader. As google will tell you, "Google Reader helps you find and keep track of interesting stuff on the web." Basically they allow you to subscribe to your favorite websites and keep up with new information as it is posted. I have to say out of the other google products we have used, reader was a little more confusing to figure out how to subscribe and not to get items on my feed that I certainly wasn't interested in, but after I got a hang of it, I was really excited. Reader is like a marquee at the bottom of CNN or FOX news reports with the headlines of the most recent stories of all the things I am interested in knowing. Sometimes it seems to pull things I really could care less to read about, but for the most part I subscribed to New York Times Education and it pulled up at least 15 articles. What a neat tool!
Finally I looked at Library Thing. This tool, as a literature teacher hopeful, seems priceless. I plan to have a classroom full of books so having a tool like this to use would be extremely helpful. I only added a few books but it was really easy to use and find the books that I searched. I also love the recommendations tab. For someone like me who loves to read, I count on book reviews and friends' and teachers' recommendations constantly for new books to add to my collection of personal enrichment reading. Therefore, I cannot express how much I will probably use this tool. The forums tool was also very interesting because potentially teachers could have their own forum on this site about a certain writer or book being used or banned from the classroom. Very interesting site that I hope to use more when I have a little bit more time.
Overall, these tools were very intriguing to me and I hope to go back and spend more time with each of them to get a better sense of how I could use them for school and for my classroom.
Excellent!
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