Aaron Arias

English 5010

Dr. Devries

Fall 2007

Social Bookmarking tools

Computers are a way of life in the educational setting, unfortunately there a too few teachers who can successfully integrate computer technology effectively in the classroom (1). What Selber is alluding to is the shortage of technologically Savvy educators who are used to working with chalk and paper.  It is not environmentally responsible to continue to use paper when technological advances have made it easy to avoid excessive paper usage.  Computers and projectors have become essential to the modern classroom that is committed to moving forward. 

          There are social networks, social bookmarking, and authoring and collaboration tools.  These websites allow you to create online bookmarks that you can annotate, tag, share, and sync with your web browser.  Even more useful in the educational setting concerning a bibliography, you can save and access info about WebPages that then can be used to create bibliographies.  As a research tool Citation Machine is an excellent research tool to begin with in an educational setting.   

          In Diigo Students can explore the web pages other people have also tagged; a good example that students can see in their web quests is that all the sites tagged with “communication” and “education,” can offer benefits from the searches already carried out by other people. Worldcat allows you to search for libraries all over the world.  If you put in your zip code, you can find the nearest one near you. In Turlock, I think that it reported “Error,” on account of the absence of a real library. In “Worldcat” there is a link that you could use for interlibrary loan and this is an excellent example of collaborative benefits resulting in a sort of Technological terror for older educators. A substantial investment of time and money is required for our society, and the pains of learning these new computer skills… require individuals to overcome the fear of something that they do not fully understand.