So Much More Than Just Bookmarking

When I would hear the term social bookmarking I would simply think, just a way to save some of my favorite sites on my computer and have easy access to them at a later date.  What was missing from my basic definition of the term was the social aspect of social bookmarking.  I never realized how much bookmarking can become a shared community of favorite topics and interests until I explored two social bookmarking tools for my LAI technologies course, Diggo and Scoop.it.  Diggo is an excellent way to not only save some of your favorite and important sites, but to organize them through the use of tags.  The purpose of a tag is to allow you to search out only the sites you saved that are tagged with that specific key word; for example esl.  Diggo also offers many other extra features such as being able to highlight specific parts of articles and use electronic sticky notes which allows you to write and take notes anywhere on a web page.  Scoop.it is much like diggo as it allows you to save your favorite sites and articles, however diggo allows you to organize your interest sites by topic.  So all you have to do is click on the topic of the articles you would like to share or read and it will take you to all of the articles you saved under that topic.  Both of these websites allow you to follow other users who post articles and topics of personal interest, however scoop.it gives suggestions for related articles.  I thought it was

easier to learn how to use diggo than scoop.it, however once I got the hang of scoop.it I figured I would probably get more use out of that site.  I like how scoop.it allows me to organize sites and interests based on topic.  I feel being able to use social bookmarking sites is essential in today's technological world, especially the teaching world.  Teachers can find so many educational tools and successful teaching methods by searching the internet and we need a way to organize, save and share all of the important information we collect for our own personal teaching. Both diggo and scoop.it are two ways to successfully do all of those things and more.