I am an ICT teacher and have rolled out Delicious to all year groups apart from year 7 this year. It has gone down very well and is an excellent tool for students to use. Now that the sign-up for Delicious has changed and you need a yahoo profile I can no longer use it in school as they need to be over 18 or have permission from their parents. It is not logistically possible to obtain permission from every parent. The students who will be hardest hit will be those from disadvantaged background who do not have parents who are involved in their children's education or do not have access to the internet at home. Please help - how can I get round this?
As a Yahoo! product we’re committed to supplying the best level of support and as many benefits to our users as possible. While we weren’t happy about it, we knew that there would be a limited number of negative side-effects to this change and unfortunately some of your students fall into this category. There is no work-around for this, a Yahoo! ID is required to access the site for all new users.
Having said that. This shouldn’t be the end of your experience with Delicious. Assuming the links you need to give your students is public; you can still save bookmarks to an account you own, assign a unique tag and add notes as needed. That way you can just give your students the link to get to the content they need, i.e. delicious.com/<class name>/assignment2 . There are so many ways Delicious can be utilized by schools without needing to create multiple accounts, in most cases one will do. Utilizing tags, comment and tag descriptions can be a great way to distribute information to a large group. They can also be used year on year so that the same content doesn’t have to be sent to new users each year. Yet still allow you to delete and replace with new content when the content found on the link is no longer pertinent. If you need anymore ideas or suggestions on how to do this contact me at sdavison (at) yahoo-inc.com , I'm more than willing to pass on ideas I've collected from other teachers and government agencies.
Thank you for the reply. However I do not want my students to be passive consumers of links that I have found. I want them to get into good habits of attributing their sources, setting up networks to share resources and organising their work using tags. Delicious was perfect for this. The change you have implemented has barred me from using Delicious in any meaningful way in school. If there is no workaround I will have to research other social bookmarking sites and roll an alternative out to all students and staff so that we have a consistent platform to share resources. I am very disappointed that this the only course of action open to me.
Hmm, would it be possible for you to set up a few accounts and ask students to share the accounts as a kind of team exercise? Something like a group of five per account, and each student could tag her own original bookmarks with a specialized tag like "by:britta"? I can imagine the groups discussing how to revise their tags to come up with a common tag vocabulary, etc., but this would involve a level of trust among students that they don't delete each other's bookmarks. If this could work, it might be able to decrease the friction involved in getting permission for registering for accounts.
Hi. I currently have around 600 students with their own Delicious accounts. All year 8 and year 9 plus any students taking ICT or being taught by an ICT teacher for our personal learning projects. So far about half the teachers at the school have accounts and we have a school account for teachers to post links they think other teachers would find useful. Unfortunately I had not yet rolled out Delicious to our year 7 students or to the remainder of the older students or the rest of the staff.
My requirement is a to have a single social bookmarking platform with each student and member of having their own account. We use Google sites to deliver our resources and by getting each student to bookmark their particular webcourse it is easy for them to then set up networks with other students studying the same course. Students working on coursework bookmark all their sources and use the notes box to record where they have used the information or image in their coursework so that they can submit their list of sources as required by the exam boards. Shared accounts therefore are not an option. Other bookmarking sites such as Diigo do not have the restriction imposed ( without warning ) by Delicious and I will therefore have no option but migrate all students to another site. This is particularly annoying as I have had to fight to get Delicious unblocked at school and have spent the summer writing schemes of work and webcourses based around the use of Delicious.
Can I enter this debate please? I support education in British Primary schools and your decision has made the use of delicious completely impossible. Your product has moved from being almost the perfect product to being something we cannot recommend as the result of your decision. There is no workaround the yahoo issue and I will now have to change the advice that I (and all of my colleagues) give.
What a marvelous example of organisational doublespeak. Roughly translated; We made a business decision, we have the cash from Yahoo and we don't care if we have soiled the purity of the product or if the students you teach (in a schools partnerhip of 8 schools - approx 10,000 students) are no longer to use the tool we have been promoting. Try and engineer some shabby workaround, as we really don't care
Well there are plenty of alternatives, we can digg if delicious insist on going down this ridiculous propriatry route.
'As a Yahoo! product we’re committed to supplying the best level of support and as many benefits to our users as possible' - who is this change benefiting apart from Yahoo? I have had a Delicious account for several years - this does not benefit me. It does not benefit my students, my school or the partnership of schools I work for. It does not benefit Bill Lord and the work he is doing with primary schools here in the UK. It does not benefit any of the teachers in my Twitter PLN or their students. Very obviously it benefits Yahoo in highjacking Delicious to promote it's own product.
Before becoming a teacher I was a project manager for a large retail bank. We used to promote student accounts heavily, not because they made any money - the bank lost money on them - but because as a business the bank realised that if they got a young person as a customer it was unlikely that they would switch to another bank unless they were very unhappy with the service they received. Your decision has lost you potentially 10,000 customers just in the school partnership I work in. Hopefully Diigo will appreciate the customer base they are going to inherit as a result of this high-handed decision.
I feel very let down by this - is 1200 students in my school a small number inconvenienced? I'm currently going through AST - if successful I will be working with teachers working with over 10,000 students - is this a small number?
Baffled that you are willing to dump so many potential future customers - your loss - Diigo's gain
treating customers with contempt is not the best of business models