Social Bookmarking in Education

Many educators just use the favorites menu on their computer either at work or home. But what about when we’re at home and need to get to a site we saved at school? This is where social bookmarking comes in! Bookmarking favorite links on the internet is something that can make life easier for us as educators – it means that it’s easy to find a really neat site later when looking for it.

Putting SOCIAL in Bookmarking

The social part of social bookmarking works like this: you can share your links that you’ve saved through a service like Diigo with anyone else who uses Diigo. You can also use Diigo to see the interesting links that your friends and other people bookmark – this can be extremely useful for a team of teachers who like to share teaching resources. You can even search Diigo to find the many bookmarks that others have saved — it helps sort out the good sites, which is hard to do on most search engines. If a lot of other teachers have saved a link, you know it’s at least popular.

Organizing Your Bookmarks

Teachers can and should also organize your links with tags. Tags are simply words that the teacher associates with a particular link and to create categories for easy reference and later access. Imagine being able to find information that you’ve seen before and bringing it into your classroom right when you need it. And a neat thing is that you can have as many tags as you’d like. When you’re saving links Diigo even suggests tags that other teacher’s, educators and ed tech people have used when saving the same links! To tag a link when you’re saving it, simply type the tag (word or key phrase) in as keywords.

Here are tags that might be used for saving a link to Professional Learning Board:

Of course, you would choose tags that would make the most sense to YOU!

Diigo has a service exclusively for teachers to use in education too: http://www.diigo.com/education. These special Educator Accounts are upgrades provided specifically to K-12 & higher-ed educators so they can easily make use of social bookmarking in classrooms and with their students.

Specifically Diigo‘s powerful online research tool and learning environment allows teachers and their students or colleagues to:

• Add highlights and sticky notes on any web page, anywhere, and access them anywhere.
• Utilize group online annotations for instruction or discussions.
• Share and interact online findings through group bookmarks, highlights, sticky notes, and forum discussions.

Join other educators who have already discovered how to make use of powerful social bookmarking tools and features in preparing for classes, collaborating with colleagues, and guiding students in developing solid research and learning skills!

Here are some great ideas for use with students and colleagues in the world of education:

• Create a Diigo account for a group of teachers so all teachers could save links related to a subject, project or course (you wouldn’t even need separate accounts).
• Have each teacher in a school create a Diigo account and include all other teachers in his/her network – very easy to share links with like-minded colleagues on a larger scale. No more emailing links!
• Collect links for student-use (make sure you tag them all with one similar tag e.g. project1 and share the url just to that tag with the students)
  
• And of course, research, find and share resources in general.

From Professional Learning Board’s online continuing education course for teachers: Introduction to Technology for Teachers