Social Bookmarking - a tool I definitely want to use.

I am definitely in favor of using anything that improves and makes my life easier. Social bookmarking is a tool that I plan to start using. I had saved bookmarks on my browser and quickly found that I had to get a method for grouping similar topics together. I did this by picking a word per group and saving related bookmarks using the word. It worked alright. I was still left with a huge list that I had to scan down each time I went looking for something.

Social bookmarking is so much better. On a large scale, it enables teachers to globally network with other educators, coordinate bookmarks within as well as between the different departments in your school, and collaborate with other schools currently working on the same or similar projects. On a small scale, it helps the teacher share resources with the students and also screen the sites the students are using. This also allows the parents to view what the students are working on and what sites they are using. The students benefit by learning social bookmarking. It is an "active" tool that they will find terrifically beneficial as they progress not only in education, but in the work force. It is another resource for them and one that they will be able to see how valuable it has been for others.

I looked at both Delicious and Diigo. There are a bunch of these social bookmarking sites and they are not all equal. When comparing Delicious with Diigo, I found Diigo a much more user friendly site. There are some things that Diigo has that Delicious does not. In Diigo you can highlight. I love to highlight so I can go back and just pick out what I deemed important the first time (a real time saver). I am also a big sticky note fan (adding comments), and I can't wait to see how I can sticky note in Diigo! I don't twitter, I am on Facebook (a lot of my computer loving friends and family have emailed me to death about joining--so I did and I accepted them as friends - to quiet them down) but I don't use it. However, I do have a blog and I'm told I will have a web site (I do want a website - for teaching) and in Diigo you can send bookmarks to the service you want to use. Diigo also does more than just bookmark the link, it bookmarks the entire page. This is important to me. I have found information on sites that I really wanted to use and reference and then when I go to use that site, or section of the site I liked, it is gone or not available. In Diigo, I would have had the page of information to reference.