EdTags, created by Adam Seldow, a second year graduate student in the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), allows researchers to organize, tag, and share their bookmarks, create RSS feeds at the site/user/tag level, view a Facebook-like profile of members within the EdTags community, upload papers, photos, presentations, and more!
Partial screenshot of Edtags homepage. Click image to visit site.
While Edtags is open to the public, 5 HGSE courses, the HGSE library, and 1st year doctoral students received a formal introduction to the tool. In addition to these participants, over 200 more HGSE students as well as participants from various parts of the world share and discover education-related materials on Edtags. The site averages just under 100,000 hits/month, has close to 8,000 pubic and private bookmarks, and about 15,000 tags in its database.
Here are some specific Edtags course/library applications at HGSE:
T-214 Methods of Teaching Mathematics
T-213 Methods of Teaching Social Studies
Both courses conducted “resource fairs” on Edtags using the web-based tool to share, summarize and rate resources for teachers in their respective content areas. Students located and/or authored materials relevant to categories pre-determined by the professor, saved them Edtags and by adding their unique course number as a tag, displayed the recently-shared resources on homepage of the course website via the iSites News RSS reader tool. HGSE graduate students appreciated both the ability to supplement the course syllabus with their favorite resources and the fact that these resources would be available on Edtags post graduation as first year teachers.
T502 Learning Media that Bridge Distance and Time
Professor Chris Dede also used the iSites RSS News Reader tool to display resources his students saved to Edtags bearing the unique course number tag. Students contributed to the body of literature informing the class and further contributed to the field of education through uploading their exemplary course research papers and projects. In addition, students were given the opportunity to work as members of the Edtags project team to gain experience in education research.
T561: Emerging Educational Technologies
Same application as T502 above.
T530: Designing and Producing Media for Education
Students share and discover timely and relevant media tutorials, blog posts, videos and websites. In addition to a few static links on the course website, the students share and access material relevant to the course via the iSites RSS News Reader.
HGSE Gutman Library
Reference Librarians created a group account to share education-related research materials with the HGSE student and faculty community. The librarians supplement the list of static links available on their website with their collection in Edtags. This effort connects researcher with data in an efficient and intuitive manner.
Congratulations to Adam and the Edtags team on building a fantastic tool for educators and researchers!
