Review of Delicious.com

For my review of Delicious.com., I will use an unorthodox approach-- a "real-time" review as I learn-by-doing (or learn by trial-and-error).

Let me start by relating my experience with a related site-- ikeepbookmarks.com. I originally wanted to start uploading my personal bookmarks using this site. I attempted to access this site three or four different times and had nothing but trouble with it. I just tried to access it a few minutes ago and got a screen that reads, "Service Unavailable." I also read some reviews of ikeepbookmarks.com and some people posted comments saying that the site is horrible and they wished they had never started using it.

Dr. Cyrus told me that she uses delicious.com and highly recommends it. I then did a google search looking for popular bookmarking sites. The top five are: digg.com, buzz.yahoo.com, technorati.com, delicious.com, and propeller.com. I was glad to see that delicious.com was rated among the top five.

I will now attempt to set up an account with delicious.com.....

I typed in delicious.com to access the website and was able to set up a personal account without too much difficulty. However, when I logged out and logged back in, I had 18 bookmarks already set up in my site, and I had not entered any of them. Sharing a computer or using a computer in a computer lab may have unintended consequences. I suspect that the tabs that had been previously established by another user were automatically placed into my delicious site. I am going to delete all the tabs on this computer and delete the bookmarks in my delicious site and try to start from "scratch"...

I logged out and logged back in... Once you login to delicious, you will be at the delicious home page featuring the several popular bookmarked sites among subscribers of delicious.com. The four main areas to navigate on this site are: home, bookmarks, people, and tags. The bookmarks area is the primary reason for using this sight, i.e., to save a list of bookmarks that is accessible from any computer. This area is further divided into these three sections: my bookmarks, popular, recent. "My bookmarks" is where you would create your personal list of favorite bookmarks. The "popular" area lists websites that are popular among subscribers of the delicious site. The "recent" area lists websites that have been visited recently.

I will now try to build a list of personal websites and enter them into "my bookmarks." I will then logout and log back in....

I think I am going to like this program. I entered three sites into "my bookmarks." I entered yahoo.com (e-mail tag), gmail.com (e-mail tag), and google.com (searchengine tag). I then logged out and logged back in. I found my three bookmarks had been saved correctly. Now I can easily navigate through the worldwide web by visiting my delicious site and then double clicking any particular site I select from the list of sites entered in "my bookmarks" area.

I think I will go back to the delicious site and start entering more websites now. Should be easy to do now....

After working for the past hour on this site, I found a bug in the program. When you enter a bookmark, you can decide if you want to make it a private or public bookmark. If you do not check the box that reads, "Do not share," the bookmark will be public. I initially want all my bookmarks to be private. I failed to check the box on one of my bookmarked sites and so the site was designated as a public site. Noticing the error, I tried to edit the bookmark with the intent that I would check the box and re-save it as a private site. It appeared to work, as an icon with a lock appeared next to my bookmark indicating that the site was now a private site. So far, so good. However, when I clicked on the site and actually entered my bookmarked site and subsequently exited the site, the bookmarked site returned to a public designation. I corrected the problem by having to delete the specific bookmarked website and starting from scratch, making sure that the first thing I did was to check the "Do not share" box!

September 30 (5:30 pm)

An important caveat: Always remember to logout properly. I have found that I visit a lot of sites via delicious and many of the sites require logging in with a password. Several times I have backed out of a site and failed to logout properly, allowing the next computer user to gain access to my account. Furthermore, just a few minutes ago I accessed the delicious site only to find that I was accessing another person's personalized account on delicious.com. This is despite the fact that when I sat down at this particular computer, I had the screen requesting my response to whether I was a "Student" or an "Administrator." Apparently, the previous computer user did not logout to his or her sites appropriately.

(A few days later)

I have not been using delicious for a few days but I do have about twenty bookmarks organized through utilizing seven tag names. It is quite a useful tool. Perhaps a practical example will help explain one of its many uses. Just yesterday, I had a need for obtaining a calendar for my desk in my classroom (I mark off each day of work). Since it is nearing the last day of September, I need to start marking important dates and times on a calendar for the month of October. I went to the delicious site and used their search utility to find sites offering printable calendars. I got immediate access to 352 sites claiming to offer printable calendars. I spent about fifteen minutes examining several of those sites until I found two sites that made it simple to create a printable calendar for a specified month. I then entered those two sites into "my bookmarks" area in my delicious account. I also created a "calendar" tag for those two sites. Consequently, whenever I have a need for a calendar in the future, I will simply navigate via the "calendar" tag to access the calender sites. Then I will choose one of the two sites and have a printed calender in my possession with minimal effort required.


Why is delicious.com important for the classroom?
This website could be a valuable tool for students from elementary school through high school and beyond. With technology use becoming increasingly important for all students, it is essential to have some strategy or technological tool that will aid in organizing, classifying and accessing the dozens of websites that a student uses frequently. It behooves all students to learn organizational skills and good time management at an early age. Delicious.com is one possible site that can be used for these purposes.

How might delicious.com impact student learning?
I will suggest one possible scenario where delicious.com would impact student learning. Students can create "tags" for individual subject areas. Using tags allows one to quickly navigate in and out of these subject area websites. For example, a student can create a section (tag) for math and include such websites as: math.com, mathforum.org, mathnerds.com, webmath.com, and homework.justanswer.com. Similar sections (tags) can be created to organize other helpful sites dealing with science, language arts, foreign languages, physical education, health, career education, and virtually any subject area of interest. Once a student has dozens of helpful websites organized, then it is just a matter of a simple mouse click to access any of the many sites available from within the delicious.com personalized website.