Koala Lou and Social Bookmarking TOO!

Welcome Readers! How enthusiastic I am to share with you a few things I have been learning while exploring a social bookmarking site named Diigo. I learned a lot while creating my social bookmarking site. I started by comparing traditional bookmarking to 21^st century bookmarking. It is like comparing apples to oranges. In my opinion, browser bookmarking systems have not kept up with the changes and growth of the Internet. Traditional bookmarking can be time-consuming and the lists of favorite sites are only available on the individual user’s computer. In contrast, Diigo allows the user to bookmark important websites and access them from school or home and share them with other students. 

Large collections of bookmarks can quickly become unmanageable and disorganized, but using a social bookmarking site allows teachers or students to write comments directly on web pages.  Many times, when I traditionally bookmarked my favorite websites, I may not have remembered why I created a bookmark or what part of the page I was trying to save. Using Diigo, categorizing websites with titles, notes, keyword tags, lists, and groups is easy.  The Diigo toolbar gives the user instant access to the social bookmarking service’s features and marking your favorite sites is very efficient.

One very beneficial way I will use my collection of resources is to collaborate online and share information.  It is a wonderful professional development tool.  I recently discovered there are hundreds of educator groups on Diigo where educators are collaborating together. There are over 200 K-12 groups available for educators through Diigo. I will continue to use this site to access current articles for professional development and have a collection of resources available for parents in my classroom. I am always looking for articles to support early literacy at home, provide solid documentation of specific strategies I am using in the classroom, and to enhance my teaching to keep up-to-date on 21st century learning. You can access my Diigo list located in the sidebar of this blog or simply click this link Literacy & Technology List

My favorite site for sharing everything about literacy is www.readingrockets.com  It is a site I frequent weekly and site regularly on my blog and wiki.  It is a combination resource for parents and teachers. From podcast, videos, articles, author interviews, and current education topics, this resource is filled with valuable information for anyone concerned with education.  Little discoveries like these that are easily bookmarked, compiled, and stored using Diigo. I hope professionals will use my resource list as a practical list of early childhood articles to enhance their instruction, while providing productive resources for their classroom. 

Here is one example of how I use my social bookmarking resources:

Each week, on my blog posts, I focus on a specific author.  Reading Rockets, which is located in my social bookmarking site, has a huge library of author interviews available to readers. I post a video each week to my blog.  In addition to providing video, I can then search this resource for articles supporting the use of author studies in the classroom or a specific reading strategy.  I found this article showing how author studies are beneficial in the classroom.
10 Reasons for Author Studies


Mem Fox 

 

Here is an example of a wonderful author interview sharing about seeing herself as a writer for the first time. The addition of a supporting article for adding author’s studies to your classroom’s literacy instruction is a win, win for educators & parents of emerging readers.