I think I have been very fortunate this semester with this ICT course. I feel like it (along with Science Methods) are two out of the four classes I actually learn something in. Although I often drift in class and distract other students, I really take everything I was taught and use it in everyday life. Something that was taught to my class (when I clearly was day dreaming) is a site called Symbaloo. Symbaloo is a free site that stores online bookmarks, keeping your favourite sites organized. For a person like me, who finds a site and never ever writes it down, this is a life saver! All you have to do to save the site, is copy and paste the link into a board you created. Sort of like Pinterest for organizing websites. Genius. I have only played around on this site for a little while so I do not have a plethora of stored bookmarks, but I intend to continuously add to it. As a future educator, but also as a pre-service teacher, Symbaloo has helped me begin to organize bookmarks by subject area. I think this is the easiest way to go about saving resources and having them so easily accessible. By organizing tabs into subject areas, I will have to do less work in the future when browsing for curriculum documents, finding educational resources and searching activities for lesson plans. I know I have previously said this bu I don't mind repeating. Work smarter not harder. As my school year is coming to an end, I am hoping to find some time to go through the resources I have, or just spend some time Google-ing sites for teachers and including them in my Symbaloo. Something I try to make sure of, is that the educational sites I am using are actually credited. I'm not saying a random parent doesn't have a good idea, but I don't need to be using stuff that is not top notch. I cannot wait to start building my online resources and am looking forward to keeping them all organized. Doube bonus!
Below I have included the link to the Symbaloo home page. I suggest that you check it out and begin to use it. That being said, I'm sure there are other sites that do this sort of thing. If Symbaloo isn't your thing, try and find something similar. It is great!
http://www.symbaloo.com/
