Thursday, January 20, 2011

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking

What is this, and how will it help my students?
In the good old days, when you found a website that you liked, you simply bookmarked it on your computer. But, when you were on a different computer, you didn't always have access to it, unless you had a great memory.
Enter - social bookmarking. Now, you can store all your bookmarks online and access them from any computer. Not only that, you can "tag" the bookmark -with a label that describes it. For example, a tag for this blog entry might be "mindmapping" and "social bookmarking". Then, anyone searching for sites about those topics might also see your tag/label. (You don't have to make your bookmark list public if you don't want to - you can share with friends, or not at all.) However, you will probably find additional sites that you might not find with traditional search engine. This is also an ideal way for students to share sites with one another and for a teacher to share links with students and with other teachers. (Timesaver...)

Social Bookmarking sites
Delicious
Stumbled Upon
Diigo

These are my three favorites, but there are a lot more out there.... please share the link to your favorite - and if you haven't tried using social bookmarking yet, give it a go - you'll find that it's very easy to do.

3 comments:

  1. Hi,
    The MDE has a Diigo group that is a great resource for MDE students, faculty and alumni. Sadly not many people are making use of it. I receive a weekly synopsis of all articles/resources shared- it can be a great source of inspiration for MDE students when they hit "the wall" when brainstorming a new way to approach any topic.

    Best,
    J.

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  2. Hi Julie - I think that social bookmarking is a skill that can and should be addressed in an information literacy class (that most high schools don't offer but ought to..) They can be a very useful resource - especially when shared with professional educators and students.. It's still important to guide students to useful sites - especially at the K12 level. If we teach them to evaluate web sites AND to check out good web sites frequently, they'll learn to recognize the difference between a hoax site and a well researched one.

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  3. I'm putting in a vote for Evernote as a slightly different kind of tool, but I think it's a good option! Or... here's Michael Wesch who suggested using both of Diigo and Evernote together a while back: http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=191

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