Delicious

As I explored Delicious for the first time, I was a bit confused as I'm not sure I still even realize it's full capabilities.  During this past semester, I took the course 524, Field Experience in School Library Media Centers, and during my time working at Casey Middle School, I watched as the library media specialist there explained to a class researching Mesopotamia how to utilize Delicious.  She showed the class how Delicious could be a very helpful research tool, as it's really useful for finding popular information on a topic, and leading you to other areas through the related tags.  As I walked around the library after the lecture and observed the students researching, many of them were using the Delicious website.  So when I was given the opportunity to explore this website tool, I decided to conduct my own Delicious search on Mesopotamia to see what I could find.  I immediately found endless information, much of which was age appropriate and specifically geared toward school age children.  I can see how such a tool could be utilized in school libraries, and among teachers and librarians collaborating, as I immediately found several stacks of links for middle school students created by Delicious users.  It seems like a very easy way for a teacher or librarian to collect sites on a specific topic for student, and is definitely a main way I could see myself using this tool in the future.  I also appreciate the social aspect of Delicious in that people can follow you and you have to ability to share the stacks of links you created.  It's similar to RSS and bookmarking, but better in my opinion as anything can be saved to your Delicious account, and shared for collaboration purposes.  Overall, I think this is definitely a research tool that I see myself using in the school library setting.