BP_3_20091010_Social_Bookmarking

The use of social bookmarking to share information with fellow teachers is a great idea. Being able to view bookmarks of other teachers is a great way of accessing sites that have already been examined or used by other teachers. When searching for a certain lesson or subject matter instead of surfing the net I can just view tags on my delicious site and narrow my search thereby limiting the time I spend searching.

Teachers can share sites that contain lessons they have been successful with in their own classrooms. Through the use of this social networking resource, "multiple people can use the same tags, so you can search social bookmarking sites for everything tagged with "education" or "social bookmarking" and get the collected archive of everything that anyone using the service has saved using that tag" (Department of Education and Training, 2009).

If classmates are conducting research on a certain topic they can share their findings through their delicious account. Finding someone that is working on the same assignment "one can check what else the other user has chosen to bookmark and share, thereby learning from a potential kindred spirit" (Alexander, 2006). This allows one to work with others in creating a bevy of resources that are relevant to educators and their students.

In an age of social networking with facebook, twitter, Flickr, an Ning if a teacher wants to maximize her connection to her students, taking advantage of these sites and networking with her students as well as encouraging the connections between students is essential. I use blogs in my own classroom and have had my students create delicious accounts to share information with their classmates. Students experiencing problems on analyzing a novel might share the novelguide website or classicnotes site to help with understanding and study group activities.

Students can access the selected tags, discuss their usefulness with other students as well as the instructor "to distinguish good content from bad- an example of collaborative filtering. Adding content (such as photos in Flickr or links to Web sites in del.icio.us) is catalyzing a re-evaluation of how knowledge is organized, stored, and created" (Oblinger, 2005).

References

Alexander, B. (n.d.). Web 2.0 Teaching Learning. Retrieved October 9, 2009, from net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0621.pdf

Oblinger, D. (n.d.). Learner, Learning and Technology. Retrieved October 5, 2009, from net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0554.pdf

Social Bookmarking. (n.d.). Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://www.det.wa.gov.au/education/cmis/eval/curriculum/ict/socialbookmarking/index.htm