Social Bookmarking - Diigo or Wakelet?

Airplane's Wake

It turns out I’ve been social bookmarking for quite some time without knowing it. My adventures took me down memory lane. The first time I engaged in this type of Web 2.0 activity was when I used del.icio.us in 2005. The most recent collection of bookmarks I’ve curated has been inside of Wakelet. I love how the founders of Wakelet explain what the name means. You see if you have ever looked up in the sky and looked at a trail an airplane leaves that is called the wake. Similarly, as an individual interacts within the World Wide Web we travel picking up blogs, images, websites, tweets, and documents that are of interest to us. Wakelet provides cloud space where we can save these items for future reference and sharing. It is a space that can be easily accessed by any device anywhere. Other popular social bookmarking sites include Diigo, Pearltrees, FlipBoard, Reddit, and Flickr. The advantage of these sites is that you can add “tags” so that they may be easily found by you or anyone in the future. For example, as my daughter neared her 15th birthday I started collecting “Quinceanera” ideas on Pinterest. I saved collections from favorites such as Hairstyles and make-up to venue decorating. 

Why is social bookmarking an emerging technology in education you ask?  Could it be that it provides knowledge sharing solutions and an interactive space for interactions and discussions? Wakelet enables users to collaboratively contribute collections on a particular theme. They can underline, highlight, and annotate an electronic text or image.  Instructors are afforded the capability to follow students' progress in real-time. Students are afforded another way to collaborate with each other and make collective discoveries. For my coursework I created an account for Diigo, I searched for “Math” and was immediately rewarded with several great lesson ideas and websites. My only issue with Diigo is that my findings were collections from years past and many of those tags were no longer valid. In contrast to Diigo, Wakelet is gaining popularity. I’m teaching summer school in July and I have started a space to curate lesson ideas for 4th-grade math. The founders of Wakelet are actively involved in updating the platform and it easily integrates with other apps. Here is My Wakelet Collection. I am excited to keep adding to this space and use it in my classroom to design learning experiences for my students.