Social Bookmarking: an essential 21st century skill for educators

Since the very beginning of the internet, and even more so these days with the endless number of useful websites and applications that we come across every day as educators, the need to organize our findings has become an essential skill. Fortunately, there are many tools that can help us to achieve this much needed organization of resources, referred to as social bookmarking.


This video about social bookmarking is a great introduction to the topic




The video also introduces the concept of tagging, which is expanded in this one.





A main consideration about tagging is consistency. Tags have to work for you, but good tags also work for the rest. Decide whether you will use a singular or plural noun (animal or animals?), and infinitive or a gerund (tag or tagging?), etc to make it easier to find things.

If you want to read further about social bookmarking and tagging, here are 2 interesting articles

• 7 things you should know about social bookmarking (Educause)
• Folksonomies article

Social Bookmarking applications

Now you are ready to start bookmarking content. There are many social bookmarking applications with slight differences. I have compiled a list for you to see and choose the one you like best.

1)       Delicious, which was also mentioned in the social bookmarking video. Delicious is very simple to use and has many users so you can benefit from what they are bookmarking too.

2)      Diigo is a fantastic application for social bookmarking. It allows tagging, but also highlighting parts of the website and adding comments with sticky notes. Definitely my favourite!

Taking Diigo beyond the bookmark is an interesting article about the potential of Diigo.

3)      Simply Box is a visual way of collecting bookmarks by adding them to a box, where you can see the screenshots of the bookmarked website.

4)      LiveBinders works in a similar way by adding websites to a particular binder, with multiple tabs within.

Other tools to explore

Blinklist

Notefish

Bag the Web

Tizmos

Skloog and Symbaloo allow you to create shortcuts to your favourite websites and use as a startpage. I can see a great potential here for sharing useful resources with students visually in one page.

Symbaloo

Skloog

Hope you have found something useful! If you know of other tools or have any other ideas, please share in the comments.