Monday, July 5, 2010

What is a Social Bookmark? How can I use it in the classroom?

As an educator, we are most likely familiar with bookmarks and favorites in the browser we use on our school computer. In no time at all, there can be a lengthy list of unorganized Web sites and folders we frequently use. What if you decided to take the day off and want to create a lesson plan from your home, but don’t have the same Web sites saved on your home computer’s browser? You have two sets of bookmarks/favorites, one is at school saved on your work computer and the other is on your home computer.

Social Bookmarking was created to save and organize bookmarks/favorite onto a Web-based service and not on your browser. Now you visit a Web site, which can be easily accessed from home or school, to retrieve what you need. Instead of looking in folders with various topics, you will now just type a few key word called tags (George Washington, politics, World War II, and so forth.) These sites will automatically be organized alphabetically with sites saved by other users. It will also keep a record of how often you use each tag.

There are several social bookmark sites to choose from, though I recommend using Del.icio.us because it’s easy to use. Del.icio.us is the most popular and best of all it’s free. However, since it does not use filters, it is only recommended that educators use it. Click here for Social Networking step-by-step directions on how to register, use tagging, and view sites.

1 comment:

  1. Go to the site below to see my example of setting up and using Delicious Bookmark for my own purposes.Enjoy!


    http://www.docstoc.com/docs/46147329/My-Example

    ReplyDelete