Sunday, June 30, 2013

Social Bookmarking

How did I miss this?! I didn’t know some of these social bookmarking sites even existed and now that I do, I’m sure I’ll be using them! One of the sites new to me is Delicious. O’Neil writes in, So Delicious: A Must-Use Bookmarking Tool, “Delicious is, by bare description, an online bookmarking tool: You find a site you like, and you bookmark it so you can return later. Delicious takes your computer-based bookmarks and puts them online. That way, no matter where you are, you have access to all of them.” I guess I have been stuck in the old days as I have always emailed myself links that I need to refer back to at a later date. When saving a site to Delicious, a link appears that refers to how many other people have saved that link as well. If you click on it, you can see who else has bookmarked that site, and the other sites they bookmarked. Delicious makes it easy for the user to organize the sites with keywords. When you save links using Delicious you are sharing your bookmarks with the world of other Delicious users.
This social bookmarking website can be extremely valuable for students. Students can follow their teacher’s page to link to important resources. Students can also create their own pages and save useful sites for when they are researching. For example, students could research specific aspects of a project then collaborate with the rest of the group. By doing this, the entire group can refer back to the useful sites whether they are at home, in school, or library. Students are making thinking visible by sharing the sites that they found and justifying why they were useful.
Social Bookmarking sites allow students to socially construct knowledge by referring to others sites and utilizing saved links for relevant information. Social bookmarking sites require discipline to stay focused but, are amazing classroom tools for teachers and students. The biggest benefit is how they make it easy to collaborate and refer back to saved resources.

1 comment:

  1. You missed it perhaps because there have been so many new technologies that have come along. Social bookmarking goes way back (in technology years that is). Diigo is also very powerful because you have the ability to have teams of students highlight and annotate any website document. It is a great tool too to model strategies of both highlighting and annotations. Glad that you are now introduced to them!

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