Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Tech Tools for School Counselors


I spent some time this summer exploring various Web 2.0 tools that might be useful to school counselors.  I have done a post on tech tools before where I talked about how much I use Live Binder It to save useful articles and web sites, replacing 3-ring binders with saving on the Web.  I recently discovered another social bookmarking site, www.Delicious.Com. 
Delicious is a bookmarking service specifically designed for saving and sharing bookmarks. It is useful tool for counselors because the software application allows for the storage and categorization of hundreds of links to interesting web sites. Delicious makes it easy to store links all in one place. The power of Delicious as an educational tool is in making  bookmarks accessible to other members in a learning community, and makes everyone else’s bookmarks available to those who are invited to join the learning community.  Delicious could make sharing links with parents very easy.
By ‘tagging’ your bookmark on Delicious with brief one or two word descriptors, enables a search to be conducted across the entire site for bookmarks others have labeled with similar interest. Therefore if you have a particular interest in say ‘Bullying’, and you do a search across Delicious, you will aggregate all of the sites that have been tagged ‘Bullying’ by popularity. The process of searching by tags leads to the discovery of content rich environments where in-depth learning can occur. Delicious can be used then as a research tool.
When you save an article or web site Delicious will offer suggested tags. You can select one or more of the provided tags or give it your own. You can give an article or site multiple tags.  Later if you want to go back and see all the sites, you’ve tagged by topic (exp.  “anxiety” )they are already organized.  Delicious also makes it easy to make individual bookmarks public or private.  If you wanted to share resources with a group of elementary counselors, I think Delicious.com is a great tool.

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