Week 4 Reflection on Social Bookmarking and Chapter 1

I really enjoyed playing around with the social bookmarking tool on delicious.com. To me, I would compare it to the favorites list you may have bookmarked on your Internet Explorer browser, but with the addition of tagging. The tagging, in my opinion, is what makes this a valuable tool. I was able to find some sites that would be useful for me in the classroom much more quickly than if I had used a search engine. I think that it does a better job of weeding out sites that are not as useful or relevant to the search and then you are able to save the sites that are what you are looking for.
I think this is a great way for teachers to share lesson plans and sites that have tips for teaching. I was able to find some ideas for the fall theme that I am doing in my classroom right now by searching the tags. I also think that teachers could use this to bookmark sites for their students when doing a research project so that the students search process is cut down by a lot. Also, this would ensure the teachers that their students are using reliable sources. For example, if the students are doing a project in a science class on the different systems in the human body the teacher could bookmark various sites on these systems that would be helpful to them. The students still need to dig through and find their specific information, but don't need to go through all the web sites that are nonreliable.
As far as the reading in Trends and Issues, I found it to be helpful to read some definitions on what it is we've been learning about for the last several weeks. I've worked in classrooms where technology has been integrated a great deal, including the use of palms and linking the computer to a projector so that the teacher is able to show websites on a larger screen, so my view was broader than simply instructional media. However, over the course of this class thus far I've realized there's a lot I have yet to learn. I had never thought of instructional technology as being a process, but really it makes sense because education itself is a process. I liked how they've included that in the definition. Another thing that I had not thought about was the noninstructional solutions. I'm still a little unclear about how these fit in. The progression of the definition as time went on was interesting too and it very much reflected the advancements of technology. I didn't see anything missing in the current definition, however this is still a topic that I am still learning about, therefore making it more difficult to spot missing pieces. Perhaps as the semester progresses I may feel different, but I do think the definition seems to be quite thorough for the present day including what I would consider the main points of this field.