In our last session we got to know some new tools which we can use in foreign language education classes. But not only usual tools, but special ones for computer based classes or projects. In the following text I want to explain what you can do with them and additionally I talk about my personal first experiences with them and what I think about their usability in school.

First we had to create an account on delicious.com. This is a special site for bookmarking. The huge advantage is that you have your bookmarks available on every computer, and it is not restricted to ONE computer only. Usually people bookmark things on their laptop and then later when they want to visit that page again they might be working at a different computer and cannot remember the address off the top of their head. This website is especially for those people I have just shortly describes because delicious stores all the bookmarks online and if you visit your account you will find every bookmark you made. Whenever you tag a link to delicious you are asked to give keywords so you can find the tag later on again. What is also important to mention is that delicious is a public page…but you can decide to mark certain bookmarks as private if you wish to.

I personally really like the idea of having all your bookmarks available whenever you need them. I always had the same problem….I have many bookmarks stored on my laptop and then whenever I needed them I was working on a different computer!! But now with delicious this difficulty can be avoided. Before I learnt about social bookmarking I have never heard of this before. I did not know that you could store all your bookmarks in ONE place…which is at the same time available at EVERY computer.

Then we learnt more about another website called: netvibes.com. I thought that this is a really complex page because there are so many things you can do with it. In class I felt overtaxed….because there were just soooo many features which I have never even heard of before and therefore it was really hard to follow the instructions…BUT now after I had some time to take a closer look at it I really think that this page works fine as a personalized start page because you can decide on all the different tabs yourself. You have one page where you can put different modules like you e-mail inbox, news, whether, bookmarks, or other things that are important for you. It is actually a good overview of all your favorite pages. Even though I think that it is a useful page I still have not worked with it regularly. I think the reason for that is that I have not had the time to tackle all the possibilities you have with this complex page BUT still I think that whenever I have a free time I will work with the multiple possibilities I have with this page and try to understand more about it.

Now that I have explained the first 2 tools….I will now write about my first experiences with weebly.com. On weebly you can create a free website which is public to everyone. The design and content of the website can be chosen by its creator. There are different themes from which you can choose the design and if you want to put pictures, texts, videos or other things on your own website it is really easy!!! You only have to click the button with the keyword text, picture or video and then you can start creating your own page.

BUT there is one thing you have to be aware of….whenever you make changes to your site the system offers you a new address with only your name, NO weebly.com in it anymore….but there is a catch: the page won’t be for free anymore and you have to pay for it!!! So be careful if you want to make sure that weebly won’t cost you anything :-)