Communication_Collaboration+Tools

=Communication and Collaboration Tools =

Social bookmarking can help solve the problem of organizing the long list of websites that have been collected over the years but are either disorganized, only accessible from one computer, or have become too unwieldy to use and manage. A social bookmarking (SB) tool allows users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks and is accessible from any computer that has access to the internet. One key organizing component of SB are tags or labels that describe the subject of a website, for example, universal design for learning, UDL, or differentiated learning, for a site that covers UDL principles or strategies. These tags group similar websites together for easy access and allow users to view similar sites when searching. This is the “social” part of the term. Social bookmarking can be marked public, private, or shared only with specified people or groups. The ability to share with a specific group of people or groups can be exciting for teachers and students because it allows teachers to easily share important websites with their colleagues and their students.

Delicious ([|http://delicious.com]) is the leading social bookmarking tool. This free add-on is an extension originally designed for the Firefox browser but can be used by a variety of browsers such as Internet Explorer and Safari. For most browsers delicious has the option of choosing a browser button that can be downloaded and directly placed on a teacher’s browser. By clicking on the button this allows users to easily save an interesting website to their delicious site. An alternative way to save to delicious is to go the delicious website and sign in.

Uses in the Classroom
 The power of a social bookmarking tool is not only keeping digital resources organized, it is also the sharing of resources and that is the **communication/collaboration** aspect of the tool. Educators have access to ,for example, hundreds of middle school te﻿achers’ best resources on pulleys and levers. These websites have been saved and vetted by other middle school teachers. Ms. D. is planning a new unit on pulleys and levers for her students and is interested to see how delicious can help her gather some resources for her students. She first goes to her delicious site and types in pulleys and levers in the Search box, and sees that there are a number of ways she can enhance her search by including additional tags such as pulley and lever games, pulley and lever projects, pulley and lever systems. She saves a number of these sites to her delicious account and creates a pulley and level group or tag bundle on her account for her students. By grouping the critical websites in one contained space she is creating a structure for her students who get distracted when “surfing” the Internet This is especially important for students with executive function disabilities, i.e., having one place to go for web sites can help them stay focused and organized. Some schools have created their own delicious accounts and teachers have added their school related sites to this site. An example can be found at [].

**Diigo**
Diigo is research and knowledge sharing tool as well as a social bookmarking site. Users can put "sticky notes" and highlight webpages which can be shared with people in a group. []

For more information go to: Are you using delicious in the classroom Delicious versus Diggo Although this is written by an elementary teacher, the information on how she uses both types of applications is useful for all teachers. Using Diigo in the classroom Using Diigo for organizing the web