Week 6, Thing #13

All About Tagging and Social Bookmarking
I did quite a bit of reading and exploring in this area before I felt competent enough to be able to put my reflections here. I set up a del.icio.us account and eventually understood the concept and how to set it up. So I have just a few bookmarked sites in three different categories. I set up some of my own tags in addition to other tags I assigned from the ones others had already used.
The SJLibraryLearning2's bookmark site in del.icio.us was a good spot to explore the features of del.icio.us and also to encounter some great resources. I found a piece from the October 2007 School Library Journal about educators' experiences using Web 2.0 ("A Little Help From My Friends: Classroom 2.0 Educators Share Their Experiences") and read about a social studies teacher in Pennsylvania who uses a social bookmarking site called "Diigo" to have his students read, bookmark, and respond to their reading as part of an online group. I guess you'd call Diigo a combination of a social bookmarking site and a .ning. This particular teacher sets up groups on Diigo for the different sections he is teaching and has his students read online articles related to their studies. Using Diigo, the students can then make comments, highlight certain passages, and place "stickies" next to those passages, with their comments. He prefers Diigo to del.icio.us because of these features. I signed in to Diigo and played with it, looking at some articles just for fun and using the comments and stickies feature. The teacher, Dave Ehrhart of Central York High School, also has an impressive site on the Classroom 2.0 .ning: http://classroom20.ning.com/profile/dehrhart.