Social+Bookmarking

Ten Reasons to Use Social Bookmarking in Education
1. Provides a free, efficient, effective, and reliable way to save and organize websites, podcasts, wikis, blogs, articles, images and other media 2. Creates a collaborative environment. The process is so easy, it’s almost transparent: students log on to the social bookmarking site with one click on the browser, form into groups and share their work. 3. Supports a discovery/exploration process. It allows you to view others’ tags and see what websites they are tagging. 4. Allows users to tap the “collective intelligence” of the Web. Allows you to see how many times a website is tagged by other people – the higher the number the more likely the website has value. 5. Provides the opportunity for “sensemaking” through tagging, annotating, critiquing or adding descriptions, highlighting and adding sticky notes. 6. Provides an effective framework to collaboratively evaluate websites. Using the comments, highlighting and sticky notes features students can effectively work independently, and then collaboratively share their findings and ideas and their classmates. 7. Encourages students to analyze the web site content. Using tags, students gain practice assigning words or descriptors to website content. 8. Offers either public access or complete privacy for a class or group of students. Educators can choose what’s best for their situation. 9. Supports anytime/anywhere learning -accessible 24/7 on the Internet. Students can login at a convenient time from any computer with Internet access. 10. Integrates with other newer technologies, such as RSS and blogging. Students can set up an RSS for a specific tag and librarians can add tag clouds to their library home pages.