Two of the most popular social bookmarking sites are Diigo and Delicious. After exploring both these sites, I have decided that I prefer the ease and user-friendliness of Delicious to Diigo's more complex system. While Diigo's features of annotation, sticky notes, and highlights are neat, I prefer the more streamlined features of Delicious, especially if I were to have my elementary-aged students join in using the tool (more on that later). Being an avid Twitter user, I was already familiar with the concepts of @usernames and #hashtags. Delicious operates in much the same way. I also like how you can cross reference tags on Delicious by finding websites with more than one tag attached, or by user plus tags. The Delicious toolbar extension is also a handy tool for keeping the bookmarking easy and convenient.
I would love to use Delicious with the other General Music teachers in my county. Often we as Music teachers are alone in our buildings, so any way to connect ideas and resources with other Music teachers is always appreciated. For my students, my Delicious page would be an easy place for them go to access videos, websites, and other resources I've shown them in class. Or, I could hand over the reins to my students and allow them to bookmark websites of interest related to a particular topic (Richardson, 2010, p. 96). Mike Forder suggests taking this idea a step further - when a student finds a website he/she wants to bookmark, then that student can use his/her own tag, such as lastname_portfolio. In this way, each student can create a portfolio of links without having to create individual student accounts. This is a great idea for my young students.
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Publishers.