Social Bookmarking
What is Social Bookmarking | Uses in Educational Settings | Getting Started | Resources | FAQ
I
will be discussing the use of social bookmarking through the exploration
of http://del.icio.us/.
Please be aware that there are other sites out there that do basically
the same thing but for the sake of simplicity - we will cover only one.
Please feel free to explore more on your own once you are comfortable
with the concept of social bookmarking and its applications to the classroom.
Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize (see folksonomy) a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others. (From : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking)
Watch Social Bookmarking in Plain English for a quick overview on the perks of using social bookmarking sites.
Have A Peek
Let's start by looking at my del.icio.us bookmarks that may be of interest to you. My del.icio.us bookmarking site is located here : http://del.icio.us/jberthelot. (Once you set up your own, you will have a different URL - make sure you write it down and try to keep it simple. A last name or the purpose/subject area of the bookmarking page might make it easier to remember. (For example: del.icio.us/gr3animals would tell me that that page contains links for grade three students on the topics of animals.)
As you can see from the image below I have added some links that you might find interesting. My del.icio.us page of bookmarks can be viewed from any computer that has internet access. If you work in two or more schools, this enables you to have one spot to save all the website links that you love and use often and you can share these bookmarking pages with students in any school.. The alternative to social bookmarking is to save all your website links to your favourites on one computer but then they are not accessible to you from another school or computer. This is web-based bookmarking instead of computer specific.
My Bookmarking Page
It is quite handy to have one place to go for all your favourite links, however, there are other educational uses for social bookmarking.
- Students working in groups can share their research results and then others can easily access them for their own purposes.
- You can compile a list of resources for a particular class or topic that can be access from any computer.
- Use tags to sort resources. Group One - can tag all their links "group1" and with one click they will see only their relevant weblinks.
- Shared del.icio.us accounts - one account per class, per school, etc.
- Professional Groups: if a group of teachers has taken on the task of learning more about a particular teaching method they can each contribute their findings and websites to a bookmarking site so that everyone can benefit from everyone else's time spent researchign and sifting through all that is available on the internet.
- Advanced: If you subcribe to the RSS Feeds of all of your students' bookmarking pages, you can see when they add items and you can see how their research appears to be progressing, you can even identify if you need to step in tofacilitate some change in research direction.
If you have a great idea for using social bookmarking in
the classroom, and you would like to share it - please email berthelotj@spsd.sk.ca
so I can add it to this list. Thanks!
Getting Started. I'd like to give this technology a try.
Please go to: https://secure.del.icio.us/register?noredir and sign up for an account. Follow the instruction you are given until you are given a username and password to login to the site. Once you have that information, please do the following.
On
the main page of http://del.icio.us/
in the upper right hand corner, click login.
You
will be directed to a page containing a login box. Type in your username
and password. If you have forgotten your password you can have an email
sent to you with instruction on how to retrieve it by clicking on "forgot
your password?"
You
will then be directed to your "bookmarking page" which will
be empty. In the upper left corner you will see the options that are available
to you.
Let's
try posting one of our favourite links to start our list off. Click on
POST
Once I click on POST, I am redirected to a page with a box labelled URL
(Uniform Resource Locator - the web
address).
So I type in the URL (the web address) of my favourite site. In this case I want to add Google to my list because it is my favourite search engine. I click on save.
The screen now expands to include a description (which is required). The description will show up as the link title, so it is best to type something here that anyone using the bookmarks will understand. In this case, Goole Search Engine would be a better choice for clarity. At this point I can also add notes and tags. Once I hit save, the weblink is added to my bookmarking page and is called "My favourite search engine." I have decided that I should rename that to Google so that everyone knows what it is. I click on edit (notice you can also select delete at this point).
Now I can change the title (description) of the link so others know exactly
where they are headed if they click on it.
I then click on save.
I am sent back to my list of links where I can check that my changes have
been made successfully.
That is the basics of setting up a BOOKMARKING page using Social Bookmarking - if you would like to learn more advanced skills, please refer to the HELP SECTION on del.icio.us and select the topic of your choice.
No questions at this time. If you have some, please email berthelotj@spsd.sk.ca and if they are relevant to this site I will answer and post them here.