Tagging to Help Teachers

Last week I participated in the Wiki Session of the K12 Online Conference. In this session, participants were asked to sign up for a subject and then given a topic to work on in teams. My topic was Tagging To Help Teachers.

I was excited to have this topic for two reasons:

1. I have already started researching how tagging is used in education. In April 2005, I wrote a blog entry titled Tagging with del.icio.us for Educators. This was a very basic introduction to del.icio.us and how educators can use it. Now tagging seems to be used more in education and written about on different websites.
2. I am also interested in the use of tagging in the nonprofit sector. In May 2006, there was a presentation at NetSquared on tagging. I participated in the tagging session in the remote conference and my notes are found here. After participating in this, I started compiling a list of websites that explained tagging. I also started researching information about tags being used in different industries. I think since tagging is very new, it is important to learn how it is used in different types of places.

Since I already had some knowledge about this topic, I contributed alot to the wiki, which ended up coming in 3rd place in the event.

I contributed content to the following sections:

• Benefits of Tagging for Educators
• How Can Teachers Use Tagging
• Benefits of Tagging Standards
• Proposal for Standards
• Websites Using Tags

I found a great article on eSchool News titled For some educators, tagging is 'it' . This helped me with content for the first two sections I worked on.

I added alot of content to the standards sections and came up with the idea for the proposal for standards. The basic idea was to include at least 3 tags in each resource.

The 3 tags are:

• Grade Level: Kindergarten, 1stGrade ......12thGrade
• Subject: Use a broad subject like Math or Science. High School teachers might want to be more specifc and add another tag for the subject like Algebra, Geometry, Biology, or Chemistry.
• Specific Tag: Add another tag that describes the resource in more detail. For example, you tag a site about adding fractions. You can use addition, fractions, or both.

An example of this tagging standard is :
11thGrade Math Algebra Addition Fractions

To find resources that are tagged with all 5 tags you would use
11thGrade+Math+Algebra+Addition+Fractions

For more information, you can check out the wiki.