PortaPortal & delicious are 2 social bookmarking sites. They allow you to save links that you want to go back to and organize them by topic or tag.

I decided to experiment with PortaPortal instead of my 2 Delicious pages (Page for K-3rd & Page for 4-6th). At NECC 2009 I sat in on a session that showed a screen shot of PortaPortal and I immediately thought that it might be easier for my students to navigate than the current tags I use on Delicious. First of all, I would only need on page for all grade levels. Also, I could add links that were visually organized under a particular topic. This would eliminate the need for my students to find the right tag cloud on the right-hand column.

My Delicious Page









My PortaPortal Page










The PortaPortal page is also much easier to build since it eliminates the need for properly tagging links and then grouping them. Instead, I can choose a title for the link and make sure that I create it under the proper category. One down side is that there are only 5 categories allowed. Maybe I have not found the setting to change this yet, but I looked! You can also put icons next to your links to draw attention to them. For instance, if you wanted your non-readers to be able to find the link for the day's lesson or project, then you could mark it with smiley face icon or something similar.

I am not looking forward to the process of transferring all of my Del.icio.us links over to PortaPortal. 2 years worth of links--hundreds per page!

I am still building the PortaPortal page, though I will add the link to it below for feedback. One thing about PortaPortal is the ads at the bottom. While I teach my students that nothing you get is for free and that we need to be smarter than the advertisers by not letting them distract us from what we really want to be doing, it will be eye candy for my students! I know I'll have some kids going to Stardoll.com instead of 3rd Grade Literacy and then needing redirecting.

Here's the PortaPortal: http://guest.portaportal.com/mshertz please give me ideas and/or feedback on either my Delicious, my PortaPortal or both!