Exactly what is a social bookmark? Many teachers already use Bookmarks or Favourites in their web browsers to save Web sites they use frequently in school or at home. But, what if you’ve saved a site on your home computer and want to find that Web site while you’re at school? Or you want to share your bookmarked sites on medieval realms with other teachers? 

The typical bookmark/favourite system doesn’t work for these scenarios. Also, because you can put these bookmarked sites into folders that you label with a name like “Medieval Realms” or “Battle of Hastings,” there is some minimal organisation, but it’s fairly limited. For example, if a site has both an interactive flash movie on the Battle of Hastings and good biographical material on William the Conqueror, do you put it your Medieval Realms folder or your Battle of Hastings folder — or do you put it in two folders and save it twice? What if there are not just two savable aspects of that site, but five or ten great things on very different topics? How many times do you bookmark the site and how many folders do you create?

The answer to that question is to consider using social bookmarking. That technique uses a Web-based service instead of your browser to save and organize bookmarks. Instead of individually saving the site in a variety of folders, you just type a few keywords called tags (medieval realms, hastings, 1066, and so on.), and your sites are organised automatically with sites saved by other users, using those same keywords. You even can see a list of your saved bookmarks, not just by alphabetical order, but also by how often you use a given tag. So, you know at a glance that you already have a lot of information on the Battle of Hastings, but not nearly as much on the the Peasant’s Revolt. Thus you benefit from the research of others, while having a far more dynamic and helpful system of organization.

And if you haven’t really got a clue what I’m on about, then check out this 3-minute video which explains what online social bookmarking is all about:

View my bookmarks by visiting http://del.icio.us/edtechfreak