bp4_2009102_Social Bookmarking

Educational Uses of Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking can be an excellent tool for personal use, but it caters even better to educational and group usage. Social bookmarking allows for the convenience of having all of your favorite sites available at any time and also allows for online collaboration.

Let us investigate the educational values of using social bookmarking in the classroom. Schrum and Solomon (2007), write "The term 'personal computer' has no meaning in K-12 unless students are assigned or buy their own computing device ... If they bookmark sites they want to remember on one computer, there's no way to access that information from another" (p. 57). Students rarely have access to the same computer while at school, which makes bookmarking favorites the traditional way impossible. With social bookmarking students will always have access to their favorite sites no matter which computer they are using during class. Some social bookmarking applications allow students can organize each of their bookmarks into groups, which they could use for each of their classes. This flexibility and organization alone makes using social bookmarking in the classroom an excellent tool, however there are even more wonderful ways to use social bookmarking.

The social part of social bookmarking comes into play as users can share their bookmarks with others. Bookmarks can be tagged and then shared with other users. Not only do you have access to all of the sites you have found but you also have access to sites that thousands of other users have found, "thus you benefit from the research of others, while having a far more dynamic and helpful system of organization" (Jackson, 2009). Many educators might be skeptical that this would not be safe for students because it is online, but there are social bookmarking sites that allow for private storage or sharing within a certain group of people.

Another wonderful aspect of social bookmarking is collaboration. "Many bookmarking sites allow teachers to review and comment on resources the students have bookmarked. This collaboration feature is the strength of social bookmarking as it permits both teachers and students to collaborate with web resources" (Bell, 2008). Students can comment on each others' links, but more importantly teachers can comment on their students links. Teachers can give students feedback as they search for project sources and also give them other sites to look at.

Teachers can also use social bookmarking to prepare for classes. "Use del.icio.us to store applicable sites for colleagues or to preselect sites for student projects" (Thompson, 2008). For younger students, having the sites for them to explore saves time and ensures that they are using reliable information. Teachers can also create a group of sites for each class that they teach, or for each different lesson that they can easily pull up at anytime. Just as students can share sites with each other, teachers can also collaborate with other educators and share information.

Social bookmarking is a wonderful educational tool that both teachers and students can use in the classroom.

References

Bell, A. (2008). Educational uses of social bookmarks. Message posted

to http://annamaebell.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/educational-

uses-of-social-bookmarks/

Jackson, L. (2009). Sites to see: social bookmarking. Retrieved

October 6, 2009, from http://www.education-world.com/

a_tech/sites/sites080.shtml

Schrum, L. & Solomon, G. (2007). Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools.

Washington D. C.: ISTE.

Thompson, J. (2008). Don't be afraid to explore Web 2.0. Phi Delta

Kappan, 89(10), 711-778.