Knowledge
A list of tools for educators and students to collate and share web resources
A comprehensive use case for social bookmarking, including a list of tools for educators and students to collate and share web resources…
What is Social Bookmarking?
According to Wikipedia, “Social bookmarking is a centralized online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Unlike file sharing, social bookmarking does not save the resources themselves, merely bookmarks that reference them, i.e. a link to the bookmarked page. Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves.”
Benefits of using Social Bookmarking in the classroom:
Social bookmarking is highly useful for educators since it allows specific categorization of websites and other web resources for easy access and sharing. The basic premise of social bookmarking is user created tags or categories in which websites are then placed. Social bookmarking, unlike standard search engines, is done by people, usually people that are knowledgeable and informed on the particular subject. Search Engine results are mainly generated by computers and therefore often misclassify or categories websites.
Teachers and educators can then make these sites available to students, other educators or groups to facilitate information dissemination in logical and simple fashion.
Social bookmarking tools that can help out in the classroom:
Del.icio.us
Delicious is a free service designed to be a place to save what you love on the web. It's easy to build up a collection of links and to organize them so that when you're looking for something, you can find it within seconds.
Diigo
Diigo is a social bookmarking website that allows signed-up users to bookmark and tag Web pages. Additionally, it allows users to highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page. These annotations can be kept private, shared with a group within Diigo, or be forwarded to someone else via a special link. The name "Diigo" is an acronym from "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff".
Livebinders
LiveBinders allows you to do with digital information what you do with the piles of papers on your desk i.e. organize them into nice presentable containers – like 3-ring binders on your shelf. You can use these online binders to combine all of your cloud documents, website links and upload your desktop documents – to then easily access, share, and update your binders from anywhere.
Pearltrees
Pearltrees is a free service which lets you organize, explore and share everything you like. Save web pages, files, photos or notes and organize them. Explore amazing collections that relate to your interests and subscribe to their updates. You can access your account anytime and share anything from your computer, mobile and tablet.
Pinterest is a free website that requires registration to use. Users can upload, save, sort, and manage images—known as pins—and other media content (e.g., videos) through collections known as pinboards. Content can also be found outside of Pinterest and similarly uploaded to a board via the "Pin It" button.
Scoop.it
Scoop.it enables its users to discover content on their topics of interest that they can curate and publish to their own web page and share to their social networks.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles.
Social bookmarking tools are rapidly emerging as an educational technology of choice for sharing information, links and resources that has been drawing educators' attention over the last several years. These tools enable users to collaboratively underline, highlight, and annotate an electronic text, in addition to providing a mechanism to write additional comments.
From creating a set of resources to conduct research and sharing it with your students, social bookmarking can help you achieve better learning outcomes. Do you like our list of Free Social Bookmarking Tools? Please do write back to us with your comments, suggestions and feedback on yourstruly@scoonews.com.