We, the educators & parents expect that our students, our children will grasp the content quickly & will have a deep knowledge of the subject. some of our students lag, despite following curriculum guidelines, providing differentiated education & personalized learning.  We try to accommodate & reflect: What do I need to do? Am I teaching too fast?  Is the material too hard? What can I do so all of my students will love the subject & not think of it as a bore? Have you ever thought what if the shoe was on the other foot? Would you grasp the knowledge as fast as my students? Being a non-native digital citizen, would I flourish or flounder?  Let me share slice of my search for tagging & annotating bookmarks for a class I am taking for GA Virtual Professional Learning.

Bookmarks

A simple device that enhances our reading pleasure.  Who among us have not used it?  Are you reading a book & need to stop?  Bookmark the page.  Don’t have a bookmark available? Please do not fold the page.  Yes, you may use a receipt, piece of thread, a hairpin or even scrap paper for a bookmark.

In a physical book, a bookmark is used as a place holder.  But we, as a society no longer use physical books as our reading source.  Now a day, we read on Kindle, hop on web for search and stay connected through social media.  Is the bookmark still relevant? Yes, it is.  Now more than ever before, we use digital bookmarks for place holder in our meandering on the web.  With a click of a button, we find our information and from there we hop around to gather more knowledge as our fancy takes us.  What if we need to come back to a page we liked?  What if we want to avoid searching for that page repeatedly?  Well, to aid us in our search for pages we have liked, we use bookmark tool.  For

Using bookmark tool is relatively easy.  In most browser, when we like a page we are reading & want to bookmark it, all we should do is click on the star in search bar & Voila! We bookmarked the page.  Depending on the browser and extensions, we can put this bookmarks in folders, tag them or annotate them.  Easy, right?  Not so much for this Digital non-native.

Creating the bookmark was piece of cake for me; tagging & annotating, not so much. I found that google bookmark manger does not allow me to share it publicly. I also failed in my search how to annotate or tag a Google Bookmark after spending a considerable amount of time. So I headed to Firefox Bookmark manager. direction, I was able to import & tag my bookmarks from Chrome.  Annotation?  I am still scratching my head.

That brings me to Symbaloo.  An excellent social bookmarking site.  I created a Symbaloo Webmix. I found out that if I add bookmark extension, I give Symbaloo permission to add or change data. So again, no annotation on Symbaloo for me.  My goal was to bookmark with tag & annotations. I can tag but need more research on how to annotate a bookmark. It will have to wait for another day.

So what did I learn? I learned that my students may be confused, need more time or just zoom through when presented with new information.  I need to give them time & truly personalized the learning. I also learned that at times forging ahead is the only choice & web makes it easy.  Finally, I realized that hard learned lesson will bring joy to all learners, including me.