Bookmarking+in+Education

By Liz Cooksey

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Social Bookmarking is one of the many tools that we as educators can make wonderful use of, not only as a collaborative education community, but for our students as well. This is a resource I was introduced to a little more than a year ago when I had to take a mandated class for our school wide laptop initiative. Although I hated taking up my planning time, I learned a little about a lot of useful resources for the classroom. In our Web 2.0 class, I have recently had the opportunity to become much more familiar with bookmarking and not just for my personal benefit but to better serve my students and work with a network of educators.

To begin with, social bookmarking essentially means that you are marking and most likely annotating a brief description of the sites that you find useful or frequently use. I was drawn to this idea simply because each year when the technology department reimaged the school computers, I would always loose my "favorites" bookmarks. So I decided I should shift to using an ‍online version of "favorites ‍." I was originally introduced to Diigo.com but another popular social bookmarking site is Delicious.com. Either of these are great for the basic use I originally used them for but offer the opportunity to turn your bookmarking into "social" bookmarking! With these sites, you can tag your topics but giving them a few key words that summarize what they do or contain. Once you do that, you can begin to join or create groups on these sites that allow you to collaborate with others, thus opening the gateways to many more sites that can be useful to your subject area.

Once you understand the concept of social bookmarking, you can see how useful it can be for teachers. I can collaborate with other history teachers around the country and share useful resources and sitew with activities.. Image you are at a small school with not one else teaching your subject area, you can use these sites and get some great ideas to really improve your lessons without having to put much time into searching for it! You read the annotion, decide if you like it, check it out and use it!

‍‍Using social bookmarking can be very useful for students as well. Consider some of the following possibilites:
 * you teach an AP class and you make them responsible for finding good study resources prior to their comprehensive assessment
 * your students are going to begin a research project, you can provide them with some resources that are tagged with specific names, places, and ideas that may help them get started
 * have your students make comments on bookmarked sites to recommend (or not) for others to use ; could be a great idea for website reliability activity‍‍

Top 15 social bookmarking sites: [] (ECHike)