Hi everyone,
This will be my final post on PLN tools, and I would be amiss if I didn’t mention social bookmarking tools. I personally use delicious, but there are other good ones out there as well. Many of my MET colleagues use diigo or scrible. I haven’t used either of the them, though checking them out are on my list of things to do when I finish the MET Program. So, while I cannot speak to diigo’s functionality I can say that delicious is an incredible tool to keep all of your resources accessible from anywhere at any time. Check out my screencast below which shows just how easy delicious can be to organize your websites.
While the screencast documents the obvious benefits of using a social bookmarking tool like delicious from an organizational perspective, what it doesn’t talk about is the “social” aspect. Not only can you save all of your “go-to” websites in delicious, but you can share them with others as well.
For instance, let’s assume you go to a Pro-D conference on a Friday and run into a friend. She asks if you know any great story making web 2.0 tools. If you rely on favourites saved to your computer your answer to her would be this, “Yes, I do! I will email you the names of them when I get back to work on Monday.” What if the teacher wanted to prepare a lesson for Monday morning? She’s out of luck, and so are her students.
With delicious, not only can you pull up your saved websites right to your phone, tablet, or laptop (which I am sure you would have at a conference), but you could suggest to your colleague to create a delicious account as well and then all of her favourites that are sitting in isolation on her computer could be put in her delicious account and you could benefit from her great finds as well. Win! Win!
One thing I do like about some of the newer bookmarking tools like scrible is their ability to add sticky notes or highlight sections of websites. (Check out the link above to see scrible in action). This can come in handy when your or your students are researching a topic. No more printing off reams of paper, instead, you go to a website, save it to your scrible account, highlight the important sections, add a sticky note or two, and no matter what computer you access that website from (as long as you are accessing it through your scrible account) your highlights and sticky notes will be available. Now THAT is handy!