Social bookmarking allows people to share the sites that they have come across and found useful or interesting, a networking way of promoting interaction and collaboration in the classroom.
A recent social bookmarking tool is Pinterest, a sort of visual scrapbook that lets you share images, links, and videos. Below are a few educators who have posted on how they're using it:
- Eric Sheninger
- Stephen Abram
- Larry Ferlazzo's The Best Guides to Figuring out Pinterest (quite a few links to articles on using Pinterest)
- Natalie Houston (also mentions copyright issues)
One of the first popular social bookmarking tools was del.icio.us.
For using del.icio.us, see
- Grossecker's Using del.ico.us in education
- David Muir's EdCompBlog has a guide to del.icio.us, which also includes the value of using RSS feeds.
- Sachi and Lee Lefever's video Social Bookmarking in Plain English
- Russell Stannard's video Using del.icio.us.
Two other tools are H20 and iBreadCrumbs. The former is a bookmarking site designed by the Harvard Law School. Read Ewan McIntosh's comments on "H20: Tagging for Academia", in which he points out its advantages over del.icio.us for classroom purposes. The latter, designed for researchers, is a recording toolbar for your web browser that records "all the web pages you visit while you research [and lets you] Save, review, and share your research with friends or colleagues."
A fourth bookmarking tool is diigo. It goes considerably beyond what delicious can do. In addition to bookmarking web pages, diigo also allows you to
- annotate and share pages,
- interact with others who annotate the same pages,
- extract and compile your annotations,
- forward annotations and bookmarks to others,
- integrate your work with your blog,
- archive your work,
- post your bookmarks not only to diigo but to delicious and other bookmarking sites, and
- much more.
For more information on why some prefer diigo to delicious, see the following posts
- In Love with diigo Farewell delicious (Sue Bride)
- 7 Reasons Diigo Tastes Better Than Delicious (David Pierce)
Also read Teaching Hack's Social Bookmarking Tools for ideas on how to use these tools.
Calendars and Libraries
On a sidenote, the social perspective of online tools has spread to uses other than bookmarking, such as calendars like 30boxes, which lets you share events with others. (You control the events you want to share and with whom you want to share.) LibraryThing is a space for entering what you're reading or what's in your library. Once entered, you can see who else is interested in the same books, connect, and discuss. Other book-sharing sites include good reads, shelfari, aNobii, and BookJetty.