Social bookmarking is a wonderful way for educators to collect and organize web addresses that they find helpful. Once the addresses have been organized they can also be shared with students and other educators. While I have been bookmarking websites for a long time I had not given much thought to using a social bookmarking tool. I did some research and found there are several recommended social bookmarking sites. This site lists the Top 10 Social Bookmarking Sites for Teachers and I recognized Del.icio.us and Squidoo as two tool that teachers have talked about before. The Del.icio.us webpage is very basic but gives some information. The Squidoo homepage offers more information about the site and gives you links to get started with.
While I found those options helpful I decided to look at another option I read about in ActionLine, the MSEA magazine. Diggio is a social bookmarking tool that provides many of the same options that the previous tools do but I found the website helpful and appealing and thought it would give it a try. I joined Diggo and installed the toolbar which allows you to bookmark sites quickly, highlight text, write notes on the webpage, capture parts of the documents and share by emailing or posting on a blog, Facebook, or Twitter.
I have started to play around a little and I found a few websites that my students might find helpful with their president's reports. I thought this would be especially helpful for my second graders since trying to find accurate information in a timely manner can be difficult. When we go to the computer lab students are not allowed to simply type in information and search they must be given the web address we would like them to use and put in a folder so they can access it without finding inappropriate material. I hope that using this will be helpful to both my students and I.
Cara, great idea about having this ready to go for your for your students so that they have a safe and quick way to access sites that you have already located.
ReplyDeleteGreat idea Cara. I like having websites ready that I can share with my students when teaching a particular topic, but always marked them as favorites on my computer.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a great tool especially if you have a class blog, facebook or twitter page, so students and their parents can have access to these sites as soon as you find them. It would probably reduce my students use of wikipedia.(smile)