Delicious is gone!

Well now that I finally learned how to use delicious I found out today that Yahoo! is going to get rid of it. The date has not been set, but evidently delicious will soon be a thing of the past. Here is the link to the story. If you look at the commnets there are people explaining how you can save all of your bookmarks to other places on the Internet.

Click HERE for the story

Wiki vs Google Docs

Does anyone have experience using both of these? I use wikis a lot in my classroom and was wondering if google docs would be a better choice. Wikis are safe, pretty secure and I have ultimate control, which I like. I also like that there is a history so I can always see who did what on the wiki and when. The biggest problem with wikis is that students can NOT edit at the same time. Information is easily overwritten and many times is lost if students are editing the same page at the same time. The article we read this week said that this was uncommon with wikis, but I can assure you it is more common than they think in a classroom setting.

I think the biggest strength of google docs would be that students can edit at the same time. The scariest part for me as an elementary teacher of google docs is that I will lose a lot of control and I am not sure if parents would be OK with all of their students having a google account with their own email etc.

For now it seems wikis are good for elementary and google docs may be better for secondary and higher education.

"Should Laptops Replace Textbooks"

This is a survey being taken on Edutopia right now. Right now laptops are winning by a pretty large margin. I am on the side of laptops replacing textbooks. To be honest in my elementary school, we only use textbooks for Social Studies and a little bit of reading. I think laptops have more up to date information, they allow students to access way more information than any textbook ever could and it will teach them and prepare them to use the tool they will be using once they are out of school and in the real world. What are your thoughts?

My dream is to have a one to one laptop ratio before I retire. There are so many things students could accomplish if they had their own laptops... not to mention the amount of paper it would save!