Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking site (http://delicious.com/), it is free to register and keeps all your interesting websites under one bundle. what is more you can 'tag' them. This means that you can attach a tag or number of tags to the web address. What is the point of that, well you can catogorise your sites. from a teaching perspective this means you can share sites easily with students. Further because you can put a number of tags to the site it means you haven't got to share all your sites with all your students, but you can discriminate and share the appropriate sites to the appropriate people. My colleague Mandy has been using the site for a while now, and whilst you can set up a network and allow access to selected people - a bit like a wiki I suppose, the way she operates is that she encourages all her students to register the site - its free and it means they can start building a list of their subject websites. once registered you can view all the popular website, or just your own, you can also search tags. this means that if you get into tagging the sites, not only with a tag that will identify what the site is about but also with a tag specific to the course, e.g. its course id number then when searching the students can find the websites specific to their requirements.

It can take a little while to set up, especially if you have lists of websites, say in a word document, but when you are on the sites it is really easy and the tagging system is only a matter of a couple of extra clicks. You must be logged in to Delicous, however if not you will be prompted as you tag your site. I have added Delicious to my IE8 toolbar and if I come across a website that I think is of use, simply click the site and add the tag, the site is then added to your list!! So simple, no need to flick from site to site or copy we addressess and paste in on a different page.

The beauty of the site is that it is simple and easy to use, when operations are uncomplicated there are far more incentives to use them!!