Week 4: Social Bookmarking

 My first introduction to social bookmarking was during a workshop at the Christa McAuliffe Conference this past December.  A librarian was running the workshop and introduced a handful of "new" tools on the Internet.  One of them, Diigo, caught my attention.  The idea of having all of my bookmarks at my disposal, from any computer, anywhere in the world, was quite impressive.  I had spent years building up my bookmarks, mainly for curricular use, to only have my PC (yes I am now a Mac convert) crash and I lost everything. I mean everything, bookmarks included.  This social bookmarking seemed to be a great tool to ever prevent that from happening again.

I immediately signed up for an account and began using Diigo.  My next level of awe was when people started commenting on the bookmarks. Teachers from all over the world (China!) explained how they used the bookmarked tool in their classroom.  Not only was I simply bookmarking sites I found useful, I was getting ideas as well. Who would have known?

The next best part about Diigo is being able to see others bookmarks.  Being able to see what other science teachers in the world find useful saves me time in trying to find sites myself.  I have to be careful though, as often I can get lost in the bookmark world!

The sticky notes and highlighting aspects of Diigo are tools that I have not used yet, but am looking forward to implementing them into my classroom at some point, hopefully this school year.  Students, especially middle schoolers, can often times get lost in reading articles online.  I teach them to mark up their text when reading, and this is a great opportunity for them to do the same thing online.  The other benefit I can see from these tools is focusing my students and posing questions myself.  By highlighting a certain part of an article or leaving a sticky note of thoughts for them to ponder, this can be beneficial to focus and organize their assignments.  Better yet, when having students do an online activity, instead of making a worksheet with directions, you could use Diigo to lead them through the task at hand.

I also have not used the education part of Diigo, where students can get their own sign in and password.  I am interested to see the benefits of this.  I am looking forward to continue to learn about the uses and benefits of Diigo and I hope to somehow incorporate this tool into my classroom this year.