del.icio.us in education

I think that del.icio.us is a great tool for education. It solves the problem of the days when teachers would write a long web address on the board with a whole lot of / , . – and a mix between lower case and capital letters. From my experience, in a class of 30, you would probably have about 5 students who would be on the website first go, another 10-15 would have it in another few goes, and there would be the last lot that take ages to find it.

Why puts students under that stress, and waste all of that time?

A teacher can quickly create an account on del.icio.us and give their account name to their students. They can create categories such as “Year8History” as a tag on each website for their Year 8 History class, and then students can just go to http://del.icio.us/[TeacherName]/Year8History for example. One URL to type in for the whole year! Or even just go to del.icio.us and type in the teacher’s name and access everything from there.

I think it is well structured, and certainly a great place to store bookmarks for students in one location. Of course, they can be accessed from anywhere and maybe students could create their own accounts and share their education related websites with their classmates.