Crowdsourcing

This weeks resource is crowdsourcing, which isn't in spell check yet. Crowdsourcing is people coming together and doing bits and pieces of a task and the final project is something splendid to behold. It is I think the essence of what is known as Web 2.0 and in my opinion the real power of using technology in education. The biggest example of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia. Any English teacher will tell you that Wikipedia by itself is not a valid source of information, however it is a great place to start research.

With that caveat in mind I suggest to you the Diigo bookmarking site. This site allows you to bookmark any site online so that you can access the site at any time from any Internet connected computer. The site also lets you add tags to sites so you can find the site again even when you bookmarked it two years ago and just vaguely remember why. Finally, and why it is crowdsourced, Diigo also lets you network with friends and join groups. A quick search of their groups shows 1432 different math based groups. I will suggest one group Math Links by Darren Kuropatwa because he is someone I know supplies some great resources for math teachers.

The power of crowdsourcing allows us to stop randomly searching for useful web sites on the Internet and start searching links recommended by actual humans. There may still be a bunch of junk to filter out, but hopefully there is less of it.

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