In today's post, I share with you this collection of what I believe are some of the best social bookmarking and digital curation tools for teachers and students. Using these tools, you will be able to instantly bookmark web pages, videos, images, and any type of web content and save it to your personal library to access at your own pace anytime, anywhere.
Some of these bookmarking tools offer collaborative features allowing you to share your bookmarks with colleagues and edit resources together. As a teacher, you can use these social bookmarking tools for a wide variety of educational purposes including:
- Aggregate educational resources into a single page to share with students
- Collect digital resources for a shared project
- Divide students into groups, provide a research assignment, and encourage students to search the web and collect and share resources with each other
- Encourage students to use web annotation tools to highlight and add comments to curated content.
- Some of these bookmarking tools allow you to create magazines and newspapers out of your curated content, a feature you can use for your classroom newspaper, and many more.
Best social bookmarking tools for teachers and students
1. Instapaper
Instapaper is an excellent bookmarking tool that lets you save anything on the web and access it in a reader friendly format across various devices. Here is how it works: Open your account with Instapaper, install the browser extension and start navigating the web as you would normally do.
When you find an interesting article you want to save click on the Instapaper icon and the link will be saved automatically to your Instapper account. Instapaper also allows you to add your own highlights and comments to any article.. Whether it is is a web page, a video, song lyrics, or anything else online, Instapaper captures and saves it for you.
2. Padlet
Padlet is an online bulletin board that teachers and students can use to collaborate, curate, and share digital content. The way Padlet works is simple and easy: users create padlets and add posts to them; others interact with publicly shared posts(e.g, through comments and reactions) or contribute by adding more resources.
Posts can contain various types of digital content such as text, videos, audio recordings, screencasts, web links, graphs, images, GIFs, and many more.
3. Wakelet
Wakelet is a digital curation tool that allows you to save, organize, and share digital resources. Wakelet's collaborative features make it a tool with huge educational potential for teachers and students. You can easily create collections with fellow teachers or with students and start creating transformative learning experiences.
The power of Wakelet resides in Collections. These are topic-focused spaces where you save and organize curated content. You can create collections on any topic you want. Here is how to do it: Log in to your Wakelet account and click on Create Collection. Type in a title and description and add a cover image. Next, click on the '+' icon to start adding items to your collection.
4. Flipboard
Flipboard is another excellent bookmarking tool to help you curate the web for educational materials and resources to use in your teaching. Flipboard lets you save web content such as videos, images, articles, etc into magazine style boards. You can design magazines on any topic you want and start adding content to it.
You can also share your magazines with other teachers, students, parents, and so forth. Flipboard is available as a Chrome extension, a browser button, and a mobile app for iOS and Android. Like Instapaper, you need to register your account with Flipboard to start saving and curating web content.
5. Raindrop.io
Raindrop is a bookmark manager that provides you with a number of powerful features to help you save and organize your bookmarks. Some of these features include the ability to group bookmarks into topical or thematic collections, add tags to classify bookmarks, annotate and highlight web content, watch videos and read articles right from within Raindrop interface, access your bookmarks in various view modes (e.g, grid view, headlines, Masonry, list view), automatically create permanent copies of web-pages and files in your collections, grant permission to collaborators to access and edit together bookmarks, upload media and files (e.g., PDFs, images, videos) and more.
Raindrop.io lets you access your bookmarks across different devices. It is available as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge extension. It also provides web, Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, and Android apps.
6. Pocket
Pocket is a bookmarking tool that lets you instantly save web content to your personal Pocket library to read at your pace and at the time most convenient to you. Besides bookmarking content, Pocket also provides you with the tools to enhance your reading experience including tools to tailor text sizes, change font styles, adjust viewing modes, remove clutter, organize saves using tags, keep track of key passages using highlights, and more. Pocket also offers text to speech service allowing you to listen to your articles on the go using mobile app.
7. Evernote Web Clipper
Evernote Web Clipper lets you save anything you find online into your Evernote account. You can save articles, screenshots, web pages, videos, and more. Web Clipper also enables you to annotate your saves the way you want. You can add highlights, insert text, and more. You can also organize your content by tags for easy access.
8. Scoop.it
Scoop.it allows you to curate, organize and share content the way you want. You can browse the web, bookmark interesting articles and webpages, edit and organize them into visually appealing content hubs to publish and share with others.
Features provided by Scoop.it include create web pages from curated content, feed your social channels automatically with curated content, embed content pages in your website, and many more.
9. Diigo
Diigo helps you save and organize online content for easy access anytime, anywhere. It also allows you to annotate web pages and PDFs and, using Outliner, you will be able to create structured research hub from links and curated content.
You can also insert text and sticky notes directly on any web page. Diigo collaborative features enable you to share your bookmarks with groups and colleagues.
