One way to inspire students to be lifelong learners is to teach them how to collect, categorize, curate, and tag resources with a social bookmarking tool or app. I have listed some of my favorites for students and teachers below. Social bookmarking makes research fun, engaging, and collaborative. Social bookmarking helps students visualize and personalize their learning in boards, magazines, or walls!  Get students to create collections for each unit, topic, or project or use any of these tools to share additional resources for a project. With one of the tools below you could easily share with students a collection that includes checklists, rubrics, tutorials and more for a task.

Tools and Apps

• Wakelet is a free curation tool and app where students add videos, photos, quotes, Flipgrid videos, and more collected from the web! This tool also supports struggling students with the Immersive Reader feature.
• Diigo is a web tool, iOS / Android app, and extension to annotate, curate, and bookmark resources found online. Diigo also allows students to annotate pdfs and tag their bookmarks.
• Pearltrees is a web tool, iOS / Android app, and extension to categorize, curate and visualize bookmarks. The bookmarks turn up as thumbnails on a board. Students can move them around and name their boards of thumbnails.
•  Scoop.it is a web tool and extension to annotate, curate, and bookmark resources in a digital board.
• Google Keep is the web tool, extension, and app to annotate, curate and bookmark.
• Symbaloo is a web tool, extension and app which displays your bookmarks as icons.
• Livebinders is a web tool, iOS / Android app, and extension made for educators to place bookmarks as tabs in a digital notebook. Students can also make each tab look like a web page.
• Pinterest is a web tool, iOS / Android app, and extension to annotate, curate, and bookmark resources visually. I use this tool with my college language learners. Check out my students Pinterest boards of their digital portfolios here.
• Cube for Teachers is a new web tool I recently learned about. Teachers create a free profile to share a list of bookmarks with other teachers.
• Flipboard is a web tool, iOS app, and extension to curate bookmarks into a digital magazine.

cross posted at teacherrebootcamp.com

Shelly Terrell is a Technology and Computer teacher, education consultant, and author of books including Hacking Digital Learning Strategies: 10 Ways to Launch EdTech Missions in Your Classroom. Read more at teacherrebootcamp.com.

One of my favorite tools is getting a significant upgrade. At its core, Symbaloo is great, social, digital bookmarking. It gives you a tile-based system to save all of your essential sites on one wall. From a school standpoint, this is great from the start because it gives younger teachers a place to have their littles easily access where they need to go.

Where it comes up a notch is when you realize that you can embed Google tools into it. This means it can be a fantastic avenue to things like choice boards and differentiated workflows. All you have to do is write the directions in a Google Doc then pop in the Google Doc link. It also means you can use it for things like curating Youtube walls

[A Few Weeks with Root]

In recent years, Symbaloo has been basically three different platforms. They have had the regular Symbaloo I talked about above, a pro version which gives some control over domains, and a system called learning paths which uses the tiles to make a game board with learning activities. Would it make sense to combine all of these? Well, yes, and that’s what they are doing. By the end of the summer, all three will be combined!

Check them out at symbaloo.com.

cross posted at www.bigguyinabowtie.com

David Lockhart is an edtech presenter, speaker, advocate, and coach with over ten years' experience teaching high school social studies. As an Education Technology Specialist with the Iteach Center at Kennesaw State University, he works with a metro Atlanta school district to personalize learning for students with the aid of technology. Read his blog at bigguyinabowtie.com and follow him on Twitter @bigguyinabowtie.