Connection+and+Curation

Delicious and Diigo are two sites where you can save all your favorite websites and be able to access them from any computer. Register with a username and password and save your links with 'tags' that help you to find them later. You can join and form groups on Diigo and share your favorite sites with others. You can also save annotations and highlighted text in Diigo. **Task:** Register for Diigo and save some links that you might find useful.
 * Social Bookmarking**

Not everything on the internet is yours to copy and share - some resources have been created by others with copyright restrictions. "Creative Commons" is the term used to describe resources that have been uploaded with the understanding that the owner allows others to use their images in certain ways.To find images and other 'creative commons' resources, Creative Commons Search is an excellent resource. It includes the popular photo sharing site, Flickr, where some users have uploaded their images with a creative commons license. For royalty-free music, Dano Songs is a good option, if you cannot create your own. The Fair Use diamond from Common Sense Media can help determine if a digital artifact meets the demand of fair use. This blog post, "Creative Commons Resources for Classroom Teachers", is also a good starting point.
 * Creative Commons**

Wordle and Tagxedo are two sites where you can create beautiful word clouds. Simply type your text into a Word document or shared Google document and the software creates an image in which the most frequently repeated words are in larger font. You can customise the font, colours and backgrounds. Tagxedo has the advantage that you can choose different shapes. Great to use when brainstorming at the beginning of topic or to find out what students already know about a topic. The one at the top of this page is created using the mission, values and visions of the Al Taqwa College. The second image was created using your responses to the survey question about the strengths of using technology in the classroom. **Task:** Use Wordle or Tagxedo to create a word cloud to illustrate a topic of your choice.
 * Word Clouds **

Lots of sites allow you to collect digital resources under one URL. Pinterest, Pearltrees and Scoop-it have become a popular sites for collecting and sharing themes of interest. For education, my preferences are Thinglink and Blendspace. Thinglink allows you to link various digital resources (videos, images, websites) to an image by creating 'hotspots'. Blendspace (formerly Edcanvas) allows you to embed various digital resources together on one web page.
 * Curation - Digital buckets**

**Task:** Register for Thinglink and use an image to link various resources.