Social Bookmarking in the classroom

I have spent the past few days exploring the land of social bookmarking. I'm not a total rookie in this field, but new enough that I still have plenty to learn. As with most of the other tools in this course, I grasped the basics, but my use of the tool was barely scratching the surface of its capabilities.

I already have a social bookmarking account, through a site called Diigo. This is actually my second experience with social bookmarking. I began with del.icio.us, on the recommendation of my fellow technology coaches through the Classrooms For the Future program. I thought it was a great way to share resources, especially since we are spread out across the state and rarely have the opportunity to get together. Somewhere along the line, the tide shifted and many of my colleagues switched to Diigo. In the interest of maintaining my network of peers, I switched too. The functionality of the sites is essentially the same, and they make it extremely easy to switch by allowing you to import your bookmarks and tags from any other bookmarking site. Diigo, del.icio.us, it’s all the same to me.

Although I was already bookmarking and tagging my own resources, I had not yet really delved into the social aspect of social bookmarking. For this course, I spent some time playing around on Diigo, clicking through tags and other users, and even adding friends. Through this process, I stumbled upon a number of excellent and relevant resources, which I immediately added to my own collection and tagged in ways best suited for my needs. I now have a much more developed network on the site, and a deeper understanding of the “social” in social bookmarking.

For classroom integration, I will recommend that my teachers have all of their students set up social bookmarking accounts. There is not a single high school student in the country (world?) who couldn’t benefit from this tool. I see particular effectiveness in the case of cross-disciplinary projects and long-term projects. Our 12th graders, for example, will spend the entire year working on their Senior Projects. By using del.icio.us to track the resources they find, they will have ready access to these sources from any computer. Tags will help them easily retrieve information they save early on but don’t need until later in the year, and also allow them to tag sites they find that are relevant for their friends/peers. I can’t wait to share this with my teachers!