Lifelong Learning with Social Bookmarking Tools and Apps

Social media symbols form a cloud around a smartphone
(Image credit: iStock/exdez)

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.

Shelly Terrell is an education consultant, technology trainer, and author. Read more at teacherrebootcamp.com