This is a reflection post as part of a Professional Development course our school is undertaking.

In this module, participants were encouraged to consider the benefits of social bookmarking tools such as Delicious and Diigo.

I was first introduced to social bookmarking at a Boys and Technology conference many years ago, when the presenter shared a list of resources via Delicious. Since then, social bookmarking has been a game changer for me in terms of how I save, manage and find resources on the web. Prior to social bookmarks, I would save links locally in Internet Explorer in a massive list that was getting increasingly out of control; not to mention making it a nightmare to backup. Slowly but surely I started to transfer my local links to the cloud and I haven’t looked back since. When I need something that I have saved in the past, I know I will have it at my fingertips in a mater of moments via the search and tag tools.

I have used both Delicious and Diigo. While Diigo offers more advanced features like highlighting and adding notes to links, I prefer the simplistic, clean, no-fuss interface of Delicious. For me, it does exactly what I want to use it for…save bookmarks. The other neat feature of social bookmarking is how you can be recommended other links, based on what other people similar to you have been tagging.

I know that there are other educators using other tools like Stumbleupon and Pinterest for managing resources. Two interesting boards that I have found on pinterest lately are Penny Lane’s collection of Daily 5 and CAFE links and Nik Peachey’s collection of educational themed videos (I’ve spent a bit too much time absorbed in some of the videos on there!).

Another tool for bookmarking which I have come across recently is Symbaloo.

As well as another alternative to saving bookmarks, it also appears to replace some of the functions of iGoogle (which is to be discontinued shortly). Symbaloo looks like a good way of visually organising links, or using it as a  dashboard for workflow.

How do you manage your resources?