63.Social bookmarking

Social book marking is the ability to bookmark and tag relevant sites  into one site held in the cloud. This becomes especially relevant and useful if you are not working on the same computer each time. For our Year 4,5 and 6 students using the laptops, the library computers and the ICT suite, having one repository to save and retrieve their book marked sites from, makes searching , digital literacy and information literacy and life in general so much easier.

There are a number of social book marking sites available. Delicious was the first, however others have quickly followed. Diigo is the new kid on the block and my preference when working with students at the moment. Diigo allows you to book mark, tag and  web sites. other features also include highlighting specifc parts of a web page and attaching sticky notes to the page.These notes or annotations can be kept private, shared with a group or forwarded to another person. Diigo also allows you to bookmark and use images.
One of the dangers or social book marking is the  social networking, allowing users to ping from their saved site to another user who has also saved that site.Diigo and Portaportal deal with this and don't allow the user to springborad into others accounts which is a plus when working with students.

But wait there is more.
The really good social bookmarking apps have an extra feature which allows you to add that app as a button on your tool bar. So as you search using Diigo and find a good site click the Diigolet button and that automatically saves your site into your account. Easy as.

How would you intergrate this into the classroom.?
If you have students groups doing research, set up a log in for them eg 6X Brain issues. Multiple users can  bookmark to that site, thereby working collaboratively to form a resource repository of useful sites. Students having their own individual account would also  aid the teaching of  digital literacy and information literacy when gathering resources and information for essays, presentations, reports, item for further reading and research.

As a teacher, if you move between 2 computers eg school and home than you can have one account and bookmark your sites to that account. Of course the filtering and tagging system allows ytou to bring up your saved hoilday sites and images in a jiffy. not to mention your IPC topic