I was in a meeting today (IIC! – get it?) and Principal Swanson said he had a link that he would email all of us. I saw my chance & I took it. You see, John has blog – but John doesn’t have a Delicious.com account. I said (piped in, really) that if John had a delicious.com account he could just tag the link he intended to email us & we’d have instant access to the information.

This is pertinent to us. Everyone in district has been calling for both better communication & more time to get our work done. There are a ton of Web2.0 sites that help automate our everyday tasks to save us time, stress, et cetera.

Delicious is a social networking site for bookmarks. Instead of saving them on your machine you save them  in an online account. That is one advantage. The bigger advantage is the social thing. Your account is public so you can share it. You can see other people’s Delicious account. You can network with like minded people quickly & find resources you never would have time to find on your own.

But back to John – I said you can share bookmarks on Delicious, but it’s elegance with which you can share information that I think is the site’s real power. Delicious takes full advantage of both ‘Tags’ & ‘RSS’.

Tags are a Web2.0 concept that works as sort of a method to catalog information. On blogs authors ‘Tag’ their own post & following conventions of the Read/Write web to help people find their stuff. For instance, I’ll tag this post with the following words: delicious, edtech, web2.0, collaboration. I know that other ed bloggers use those same tags & since we want to spread these concepts we use tags to make our information easier to find.

RSS stand for Really Simple Syndication. It’s what allows all these sites to work together, to pull in content, to share information, even to send your podcast to iTunes – for free! As an example I have set up an RSS feed to a tag from my Delicious account. If you go to the left navigation & scroll down just past the badge for Classroom2.0 you’ll see an RSS feed for Web2.0. Click on it. All that comes from my Delicious account. The beautiful thing is that I set it up once and from now on when I tag something ‘web2.0′ in Delicious it will automatically be feed to this spot here at ElasTECHlearning.

Link: Delicious

The whole sign-up & email issue has been sorted out! Phew. You can now head to blog.d62.org and launch your blog.

In geekier news you can now post to & read your blog from your iPhone. Head to the iTunes app page and get the WordPress app. For more information head to the main iPhone WordPress blog.

My name is Seth and I’m the new tech director for d62. I started July 1, 2008. I’m very excited to be here & hope some of you will join me out in the blogosphere. Beyond the District 62 blog site we will be launching a district wiki courtesy of Wikispaces.

Even if we haven’t met yet, contact me bowerss@d62.org if you’d like to start your classroom blog.