Have you ever run into a great website at home to use in the classroom, but when you get to school you can't remember it and performing a Google search doesn't get you anywhere? Then you really want to consider social bookmarking!

What is social bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is a network of people who collect favorite or bookmarked websites, categorize them with keyword tags, and share them with others. Others can view these bookmarks or favorites and add them to their collection as well as keep tabs based on their feed. Social bookmarking becomes a dynamic process rather than static because these lists of sites are always changing due to the ease of the process.

What are "tags"?
Think of tags as keywords to the object (website, picture, music, etc.) you're viewing.

Here is a short video highlighting the social bookmarking service del.icio.us (the video comes from Jeff Utecht and Utechtips.com)


Here is another video in the Plain English series for you to check out. Video courtsey of Common Craft.


What is the difference between social bookmarking and collecting bookmarks on the web?
Sites like portaportal and ikeepbookmarks allow you to collect your bookmarks/favorites and store them on the web, but they don't let you interact with others. Social bookmarking sites let you make recommendations to other users and provides easy access to add them to your collection. Social bookmarking sites also let you know search for sites by tags which can provide users with quality control because the bookmarked sites also let you know how many people have it in their collection. You can also track users to see what resources their finding.

How can I use it in my classroom?
Teachers can utilize social bookmarking in a variety of ways.

1. Teachers can share their bookmarks with parents to help them help their children find quality resources
2. Teachers can set up a tagging system so students can have a bank of sites to help them find quality websites in researching topics and not loose time Googling their topic
3. Work within the network to find Internet resources to support classroom activities
4. Promote higher order thinking skills by allowing students to focus on how to retrieve resources rather than where to find it.

Where can I go to get started?

• del.icio.us
• digg
• furl
• blue dot
• stumbleupon

Social Bookmarking Example