As my students encountered numerous difficulties during their animal research projects, I have begun to evaluate how to provide research links to students in an easy to use format. First, I provided the websites on my classroom webpage, but my students quickly announced that they were overwhelmed and the websites lacked organization. Next, I embedded the websites in a word document, but alas students still complained that the websites were hard to find day to day, especially if they had been using a specific website the day before and couldn't remember the title the next day. Therefore, I have been searching the web for a social bookmarking site and I have come across Tizmos.
"Each tizmo contains a screenshot and link to the online resource and allows you to customize the title & other options" (Tizmos, 2013). Tizmos is a visual bookmarking site and is student friendly by incorporating an image, title, and even a description. You can mark numerous webpages on Tizmos and organize the bookmarks by grade level, class, subject, etc. As seen on the Tizmos blog, Tizmos encourages teachers to use the images in conjunction with their website links.
Technical features of Tizmos include creating a free account or paying up to $9.99 for a premium account which includes adding videos and creating lessons.

This tool looks great! It reminds me of symbaloo which I have seen used before. I just had a symbaloo link shared with me from another teacher in Howard County who was putting together math common core sites for kindergarten students. Amy should check it out! :) And Liz, I wonder how the two web 2.0 tools compare? I'll have to try Tizmos and see.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.symbaloo.com/mix/kindergartenqtr3-4
Liz, I really like this tool! Like you, I often put links to various websites into a word document for student use. Young students have a difficult time manipulating so many applications at one time and they are still learning to read. I really like the screenshot aspect of Tizmos and I like how you can organize all of your links! I look forward to trying this in the future.
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