From an email from one of Yahoo.com's experts, "great summary of social bookmarking sites. I work for Yahoo! and saw that you mentioned My Web 1.0 Beta but didn't mention our new version - My Web v2.0. I think you might find it worth a look - it offers tags vs. single categories, the ability to invite friends (students, colleagues) to join you in your pursuit & sharing of knowledge, and the ability for you to tag & share interesting articles, websites, etc. with your search community, the world, or just with yourself. You can check it out at myweb2.search.yahoo.com.
Would love to get your thoughts if you get a chance to try it."
I checked out myweb2 this morning for a few minutes.
Personally, I need a button java script for Safari so I can just click on the button to add a site to to MyWeb2. I do not use Yahoo! Tools. After looking at My Web v2.0 this morning, I noticed that I can download a version of Yahoo! Tool for Mozilla, but no thanks. I noticed a post in the My Web Message Board about a browser button, but I could not figure out how to get it to work...It is Monday, I will try later in the week-- haha!
My immediate gut feeling of this beta site is that my middle school students would not like how it looks. Middle school students like site with images/graphics (not too many). This is a site my students like to go to Sparknotes .
I know, it is Beta, and things change. On the user interface side- we I logged in the first time using my PowerBook G4 and Safari, the program tried to import bookmarks. However, it did not import any. No, I am not going to buy a Dell--been there, done that. We have lots of PCs in our school, and lots of folks that can use that feature. We use Foxfire on all our student accounts as browsers. We have a program that restores computers to the way they were set before students use them and deletes any bookmarks they create. So, a social bookmarking product is something our students could use. When they move from a laptop lab, to a desktop, they can just log in to myweb2 and access their bookmarks. I am interested in watching how my students this year use and also learn to abuse this tool. They can tell you where to find Rap music online, and every inappropriate web site our IT dept and our high price content filter and firewall has not blocked.
Classroom use of a social bookmarking tools is a little different from other uses, but that is were the teachable moment comes in. Part of what I try to teach my students is the standard course of study, but also, our school focuses on how well our students do when they return to their school after being with us. So, if they learn how to use a bookmark tool and can take it with them, that is really cool.
I think our teachers will like this. Maybe Yahoo could develop a handout our video to teach teachers how to use My Web.
Myweb2 has a cool Message Board feature.
I need to be able to invite my teachers, but I do not have Microsoft Outlook - I need to be able to import names from my Apple Address Book. How about adding some way for me to import all my contacts.
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