Purpose & Objectives

Social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and DIIGO are replacing 'favorites' and 'bookmarks' amongst fans of Web 2.0. Understanding the power of these tools will increase your productivity as a teacher; it can also help you redesign assignments in ways that increases and assesses critical thinking skills in your students. Alan November encourages educators to fight increased plagiarism by redesigning the assignment. Social bookmarking tools allow you to do just that.

Participants will

-learn the difference between traditional bookmarking and social bookmarking.

-explore ways that social bookmarking supports 21st century literacy including higher critical thinking in students.

-see examples of redesigned assignments and assessments that use the collaborative and interactive features of social bookmarking

--practice installing the tools necessary for social bookmarking,

--conduct searches using the powerful features of social bookmarking,

--create compilation of resources using tags and annotations using social bookmarking tools

--share and publish research, recommendations and links publically or privately, reviewing settings that can increase the power of your social bookmarking collection that produce desired outcomes for educators (such as pull out only relevant links parents, or for ‘learning centers’) or Embed selected links or 'tags' from your resources so desired resources appear seamlessless into your own classroom website

--use the network features of this tool to create a professional learning network of peers

--review some of the features of other social bookmarking tools

Outline (for BYOL)

(10 min)Introduction to Social Bookmarking

Introduce Wiki with examples highlighting

- the difference between traditional bookmarking and social bookmarking

- ways that social bookmarking supports 21st century literacy including higher critical thinking, increased collaboration

- examples of assignments and assessments redesigned to use the collaborative and interactive features of social bookmarking

5 minutes - Review Delicious buttons

- Tools should be pre-installed from delicious.com

Will create a process for audience to help others install tools as they arrive. This worked well last time and everyone was ready when workshop started.

Collaborative help from neighbors in installing bookmarking tools associated with del.icio.us for easier management of online information (download from del.icio.us web site and install button.

I will demo how to use the tool if you don't have admin access to your computer. I will also have a link on my website that can help people participate even if the tools are not downloaded.

5 minute - Searching Others Recommendation

-- demonstrate the use of the social interaction inherent with social bookmarking cites to find and evaluate relevant websites more quickly

10 minutes - Organizing your own resources (finds)

-- use tags to organize work and to collaborate (learn how 'tags' can be used in the redesigning of traditional research assignments

--use annotation and notes features to streamline research or assess higher level thinking skills

--create community by combining the network tools and 'tagging' practices

10 min Publishing your finds

-- collaborate, share, and publish research, recommendations and links publically or privately.

-- adjust settings to pull out only relevant links for a specific outcome (such as recommended website for parents)

--embed selected links or 'tags' from your research seamlessless into your own website

10 min Pros and Cons of 'other' social bookmarking tools (Q & A)

Discuss some of the highlights of different social bookmarking tools.

Answer questions from audience

Differentiaing: Each of the activities engages participants in tagging bookmarks that will be immediately accessing to audience as we work through the activities. Those who have already completed the tasks will have a wealth of new bookmarks from the audience to explore as their neighbors finish the tasks. This worked well last year. I also encourage participants to acknowledge a nearby audience member as their tier one tech support. This helped the tone for collaboration.

Supporting Research

"It is very likely that many students are engaging in less critical thinking because of the Internet.".. Alan November. We need increased toolset to help us redesign assignments that discourage plaguirism. Teachers can benefit from understand the potential of social bookmarking to be such a tool.

The evolution of del.ici.us and other social bookmarking tools is huge. Are educators using these tools to increase productivity?

"The current social web era started with del.icio.us and the advent of social bookmarking. The simple concept of a tag has turned our interactions with the web upside down. The idea of being able to store your bookmarks online, share them with everyone and see what others have bookmarked - triggered the sequence of events that resulted in today's rich and social web ecosystem." Read/WriteWeb