Social Bookmarking

Does Social Bookmarking have an application in your classroom?

Social bookmarking is a great way to organize a multitude of web sites not only for others to see, but for me to find as well. I think that social bookmarking definitely has an application in the classroom. Social bookmarking can allow me to organize web sites that I may need at a later time and web sites that I want to share with students. Anytime I come across a web site that I may want to come back to later, I can bookmark it and it is just a click away. I think it is a little harder to use a tool such as this in a math classroom, but I think that it can definitely be used by the students, mostly outside of class. This is a great tool for students to use when at home; since it uses technology they may prefer using social bookmarking as part of a homework assignment instead of the classis pencil and paper.

What are some ways it could benefit you and your students?

For my own purposes, I can use it to mark sites with good lesson ideas, references, or things I may want to show the students in class. Social bookmarking also allows me to share with other teachers and look at the sites that they have tagged. If I am stuck and not sure how to get a certain topic across to the kids, I can look up other people's bookmarks and see if there is anything I can use. Another way that it can benefit both myself and my students is in the teaching process. Everyone learns differently, and it is the teacher's job to make sure that every student understands the lesson. As technology continues to grow and as people become more reliant on it, I think that some students will start to learn better via technology. I can use social bookmarking to help my students by tagging certain pages for them to look up at home to suppliment the lesson. So maybe I would teach factoring to an 8th grade class, then I tell them to go home and look up a few links which describe factoring in different ways. From strictly the students perspective it could definitely help when researching for a project. If I tag some pages and give the students a start point when researching, then it can really help them. They also have some sites to fall back on if they struggle finding information.

Could it have helped you in the past?

I do not think that social bookmarking would have helped me a lot in the past in my math classes. in my other classes it could have helped me a lot more, but as for math I do not see a lot of areas where I would have used it. Where it would have been helpful would have been maybe finding videos or examples of how to do certain types of problems. Some problems can be done different ways and sometimes it is nice to see the multiple ways to do a problem, that way the student can choose the way he/she understands best. Another way social bookmarking could be very useful is if teachers would like to post solutions to problems. I know that some of my teachers assigned odd problems so that students could check the back of the textbook to see if they were right or not. The problem is that if a student does not know how to attack a problem, the answer will not help. If I had a list of web sites with solutions, I would have been able to understand a lot more of my homework when at home, and as a class we may have been able to spend less class time on homework and more on learning new material.

Can it help you now as an Albright student...how?

Math is one of those things that does not really change TOO much no matter what level one is doing. I mean my college math classes are significantly harder than my high school classes with all of the proofs and such, but the main way I think that social bookmarking could help me now is by having links to sites with answers, as I said above. Actually, I think it would be even better in a college class because with proofs, books cannot put all of the answers in the back of the book. The answer to a proof is in the work itself. I would love to be able to look at a proof that I don't understand and reason through the steps to figure it out on my own. At the college level professors do not have to worry as much about people just copying answers because if students are this dedicated to their majors, they will want to understand where the answer comes from, instead of just copying down an answer. Students will teach themselves if they must, then go to the professors if they need to. Social bookmarking could also come in handy in regards to my senior seminar class because we have to write a 30 page paper on a math topic. It would have been awesome to browse through bookmarks when searching for a topic, and even after finding the topic, so that we could find information on the topic. I feel like social bookmarking is a great tool when researching a topic. I used the bookmarks that Ms. Mislevy posted when looking for lesson plans incorporatin technology. I tried doing a Google search, but the search gave me a bunch of results that did not help me. After browsing through bookmarks, I was able to narrow my search down within those sites and go from where. This is much more efficient than sorting through a Google search.