Bookmark This, my PLC Posse

As someone who has been a companion of chaos for most of my days, I chaff a bit at the multitude of organizational structures marketed to us in our virtual world.  Ironically, I sometimes feel more disorganized by the variety of tools that promise to keep my cyberworld more organized than my physical surroundings. Social bookmarking is the tool of the week.

My big commitment to social bookmarking is Pinterest.  Many moons ago, I did some browsing on del.icio.us but never committed to creating my own stacks.  Similarly, I initially only stalked others' Pinterest boards, but later grew to love organizing my pins and following others.  I enjoy having friends and colleagues - and my young daughters - share a pin to one of my boards.  Also, the visual beauty of Pinterest boards simply make me happy.  

By comparison, Diijo pages are not so pretty, and I am less motivated to start the process of bookmarking over again.  Can I transfer content to Diijo from Pinterest? Is there some benefit it doing that?  I will have to play around with the features of it to weigh how this tool would benefit my students more than providing links via another medium. I do like the ability to highlight text and annotate.  Also, its simpler visual format may keep me more focused on the task at hand. :)

In other geeky tech news, I have been playing around with another app/site called instagrok.com that I culled from a list of resources from a session at the Illinois Reading Conference last week.  Teaching friends - check it out.  You enter a topic, and it creates a concept map of facts, websites, images, and videos that you can customize and share with your students.  You can even modify the difficulty level of the reading.  How does this magic take place?  It's crazy.  And free.

I'd love to know your success stories with Diijo.  Meanwhile, I've got to pause from organizing from my keyboard and start dealing with the immediate chaos of laundry, dishes, daughters, and schoolwork.  Unless, of course, there's a great app for that. 

P.S.  added late:  Clearly I need a PLC whose sole purpose is to make sure that I understand all of the reflections that I am supposed to complete each week for this class.   I created a Google+ community for Young Adult Book Reviews.  I can "leverage" this community in my classroom by providing an authentic interactive audience for my students' written reflections about books.  Building this community will empower my students to communicate more freely among the three sections of my class.  Further, students who are verbally reticent will have equal access to have their voice be heard.  Finally, while I l-o-v-e recommending books to my students, they will benefit from hearing other titles shared by other 8th-grade readers who were born in the same century as they were.  I'm still concerned that I do not understand all of the privacy settings, though, and I want to make sure my students are protected. (I'm also concerned that the icon for a PLC looks like a dad reading the paper during his daily constitutional.)