EDUCATIONAL USES OF SOCIAL BOOKMARKS

Educators are discovering innumerable ways to use social bookmarking to help students meet their educational standards and goals. Small groups and entire classes use bookmarking services for collaboration and sharing common information. At most social bookmarking sites, a group account can be established, with the password shared among the participants or, in what is probably a safer and more useful version; a group can establish a unique tag and tag all group-related links with it.

For individual projects, teachers can save the URLs of pages for students to read. To access their reading assignments, students can use a news aggregator to view their new postings automatically from school, home, or wherever they may have an Internet connection.

Using social bookmarking sites, students can take control of selecting and archiving their own resources on a given topic and sharing those links with their classmates.

Many bookmarking sites allow teachers to review and comment on resources the students have bookmarked. This collaboration feature is the strength of social bookmarking as it permits both teachers and students to collaborate with web resources. Everyone can contribute to a project as well as reap the benefits of teamwork.

Using a bookmarking site, such as Diigo that allows users to post notes directly on the web page, teachers can set up a group account per each class. They are then able to verify if a student has read an online article or if they have understood what they have read by the notes they have posted on the web page.

Some schools have expanded the usefulness of the school web page by placing web links of a bookmarking site directly onto their school web page. The visitors to their site are then alerted to any updates of news that is relevant to the school’s mission and environment.

A school Web site can be used to track author and book updates and can immediately notify web viewers when a new book by a particular author is released. Some schools like to share bookmarking accounts between different subject specific educators in a school in order to share resources with each other. Others like to share one account between a large number of educators across a school district that teach in diverse settings in order to create a broad and deep set of resources.

Some bookmarking sites such as FURL provide citation services that will create a bibliography on a new Web page so you can cut and paste the bibliography into your document. Users can select from MLA, APA or Chicago Style bibliography format.

The most common social bookmarking sites used in schools today include:

• del.icio.us

• CiteULike

• Digg

• Diigo

• Furl