Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites are a great way for people to share, organize, search, and manage their web sites.  In the past when a worthwhile web site was found, one would have to save it to your favorites in Internet Explorer or another web browser.  There was no easy way to access these "favorites" from a different computer or to quickly and easily share your bookmarked sites with friends and colleagues.

Now with the use of social bookmarking sites, one can access saved Internet resources and also share them with others.  You can even decide whether you would like your sites to be available to the public through searches or to remain private.

Social bookmarking sites could be used in the classroom for teachers as well as with students.  These sites can be used for something as simple as managing web sites for different curricular units.  If a teacher was going to teach a unit about weather, they could add the websites they've found that are useful for this unit and tag them with the word weather so they could easily be viewed when searching.  Teachers could also use the search feature on a social bookmarking site to help them find useful resources for the units they are teaching.  Teachers and students could access these bookmarks from any computer at school, at home, at a library, or from any computer with Internet access.  Social bookmarking sites also allow students to collaborate with other students as well as teachers.  Students can share their bookmarks that they have found to be worthwhile with their classmates.

There are many social bookmarking sites available and they are free of charge.  Some of the sites that are not blocked by the BCPS filter are: digg, reddit, del.icio.us, and diigo.  One social bookmarking site I found, edutagger, is geared specifically for K-12 educators.