Thing #13 Tagging and social bookmarking with Del.icio.us

I looked at all the tutorials for the 3 bookmarking websites suggested. I looked at Del.icio.us first, so I went ahead and created some bookmarks for the 5th Grade research unit for the 4th six weeks on the Birth of American Democracy. I had already found the websites I wanted to use on Nettrekker and some of the other research tools on our library website. I entered them into Delicious and added tags such as Articles of Confederation, Constitution, Bill of Rights, Branches of Government, etc. You can check out my saved bookmarks on Del.icio.us, by looking at the widget in the sidebar on this blog. Now I have to figure out how my students can access the bookmarks I created. I'm at home, so I can't sit down at one of the student workstations to see if I can access my bookmarks on each student computer and add them to favorites, or if there is something else I'm going to have to do. If you have any insight, I'd love to know what my next step is.

Later I am going to go back and create accounts with FURL and Ma.gnolia to see if I like them better. I liked some of the options they offered like being able to view the whole page and highlight the parts you want emphasized and being able to filter by searching by topic or date. Other things I liked were finding out who has some of the same interests as I do and being able to copy their bookmarks and share them with people I know by e-mail or through RSS feeds.

In Ma.gnolia I liked the fact that when you do a search, you can subscribe to the results you get and new feeds for that topic are sent to your RSS feeder.

One thing that was mentioned in one of the tutorials was the ability to pick a unique tag for a specific group of people who would be able to post their findings to the shared tag. I'm wondering if something like this would work for the elementary librarians when we are trying to gather websites for research units throughout the year. It sounds like a quick and easy way of sharing information that will save time so that everyone isn't spending time trying to do the same thing, separately.