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.

Mindmapping and Brainstorming together.

Sorry about the late posting today.  If you don't know the benefits of mindmapping - check out this youtube link by Tony Buzan, the person credited with creating the concept.  In the physical classroom, I learned how to use Inspiration, a commercial software that our school district had purchased.  This was my software of choice - it's easy, and most school districts have it installed.  However, in the virtual classroom, students may not have access to commercial software.  Same for students who actually want to complete the homework assignments.   Fortunately, today there are , there are  several mindmapping applications available, free of charge.  My favorite is xmind.  Free to download, it is relatively easy to learn and quite intuitive, espeically if you have already used inspiration.   They have a free shared mindmap of the day – so if you’re not familiar with how they work –check out their examples  for some ideas. They also have a neat video tutorial that is helpful.


Link to mindmap of collaborative learning tools

Sample picture of simplified mindmap created by me in about 10 minutes.