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| The last thing I need is for my students to be surfing the Net with no guidance. We'll need to use a social bookmark system. |
The pure volume of data online demands that we find practical ways to organize and archive what we need. Social bookmarks are an online tool which make it possible to save, tag, sort, and share articles for specific uses. In education, we can use social bookmarking to share valid and reviewed resources with students and colleagues. The use of annotations and tags gives us the ability to create our own categories, which is important for future access and applications.
The two main social bookmarking tools were Delicious and Diigo. Del.icio.us was created in 2003, and popular for many years. More recently, educators have been using Diigo, because it had tools such as highlighting, sticky notes, and classroom student accounts, which were free to educators. I had heard of Delicious. I was wondering if it was the same or different from Diigo. I researched the differences, and decided to stay with Diigo. I already had a Diigo teacher’s account, and it made sense to stay with that.
I have five groups on my Diigo account, including an #IEASC group, and a public group of educators who use Diigo. I started a group for the #Smart Choices Project critical thinking curriculum that I am co-writing. The collaborators will explore how we will utilize Diigo. We have defined five tools for critical thinking that we are incorporating in our design. They are, Awareness, Questions, Research, Decisions, and Actions. The Research piece will provide participants experience evaluating the validity and point of view of sources. Using the Diigo tools will enhance our program’s ability to guide our students in this process. Students will also be able to add their thinking process to the Diigo group, which peers and educators can review.
The specific NETS-S standards which we we are using for our Smart Choices Project include research and information fluency, communication and collaboration, and critical thinking and problem solving. The participants will need to evaluate and synthesize the sources, and determine what their own values are in comparison to those of the sources they evaluate. We are incorporating authentic problems such as how to manage time and social activism into our program. Participants will be guided in creating projects which will demonstrate their abilities to work collaboratively and communicate clearly. Although we haven’t incorporated use of a social bookmarking system yet into our curriculum plan, it has great potential to provide experiential opportunities for participants to practice the ISTE standards which they will need to be successful in work and personal life.
This article defines social bookmarking, and explains how to use it.
This article provides a detailed comparison between delicious and diigo, making the case that diigo is more flexible and suited for education. It includes screenshots and links to tutorials for using diigo.
This is an article which defines social bookmarking. It has links to other articles, and was updated in January 2013.
This is a step by step tutorial on how to use bookmarking for teachers and students.
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