Before we get back to school and we (or at least I) am too busy to think about anything much beyond getting through the weeks, I thought I’d put a bit more of a substantive post up.  This is about how I use shared bookmarks to help me store resources, provide ‘extra reading’ (or media) for students, and use this alongside psychexchange resources.

If we go to www.delicious.com/sjgknight.  By using the ‘tag bundles’ on the right, you can select ‘psychology’ (under ‘subject’) and relationships (under ‘PsychTopics’).  At the moment this will bring up about 70 bookmarks, we’ll narrow that down again to ‘sexual.selection’ bookmarks (see video for more detail on using delicious)

Using the same principles, you can navigate all of my bookmarks – subject, to topic.  Within each topic you can see which sub-areas have been most frequently tagged (Eyewitness testimony, or ‘EWT’ under ‘memory’, for example).

Using the ‘sexual selection’ bookmarks, I’ve used the Seinfeld clip www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsusKuZ1uL0 to get students thinking about sexual selection and attraction.

Following that you could use the videos here: http://www.delicious.com/sjgknight/relationships+sexual.selection+video

I like to split the students into groups of about 3, each with a laptop and ask them to watch 1 or 2 videos each.  The question prompts here could be used alongside these.  The session could also involve reading a selection of articles, either provided for students or of their choice from the original sexual selection bookmarks.

Students could be encouraged to think about how these bits of evidence fit into the relationships scheme of work by using an essay grid and placing each bit in it.

This will hopefully be the first in a series of posts of this nature so feedback – even if it’s to say ‘don’t bother’ would be much appreciated so I can keep my posts as useful as possible.  I’d like to use combinations of people’s resources in the future so I’ll keep an eye out for ways I can do this, but if you have an idea then contact me via psychexchange.  My aim is to write a few posts which ‘bundle’ media & psychexchange resources for a full lesson or set of lesson ideas.

If you want to use delicious there are a couple of ways – simply using my & other people’s bookmarks, or by creating your own account.  If you take the latter option, you can tailor bookmarks to your classess/interests, and also join my network – providing a ‘searchable’ network of bookmarks including mine and yours.  This also allows you to link with other subjects as MrESpiers – a sociology teacher – and I have done.  My (small) network is here.  We also both tweet, sjgknight and MrESpiers.

The movie was made using the opensource CamStudio and (also opensource) Virtual Magnifying Glass with editing in Windows Live Moviemaker.

PsychClips is a great new web site for psychology teachers to share video and audio clips that are hosted on youtube-type sites.

There are already almost 100 video clips on PsychClips and with other psychology teachers help this should grow considerably. Some of the videos are the better-known ones such as the Milgram and Zimbardo clips but there are already some lesser-known ones that psychology teachers may not have seen before embedded on the site.

The site is free although you do have to register. Teachers who have already registered for PsychExchange can use their existing user name and password to access PsychClips.

Possibly the best feature of PsychClips is the book-marking facility. Teachers can add clips to their own profile so that they have instant access to these psychology clips when they log on. This is so useful for teachers who have access to networked interactive white-boards in their classroom – like me.

For a list of youtube-type video sharing sites check out yube.co.uk