Social Bookmarking

At our beginning of the year superintendent's day we had Alan November come talk to us. He spoke about technology and education. It was sort of amusing to look at the audience of elementary to high school teachers and realize that about half of us were totally fascinated (me) and the other half were totally lost and/or bored to tears.

One of the things I took away from that lecture was the realization that Google is not always the best search engine. Google is basically a popularity contest. I lost track of the specifics, but it somehow counts how many links lead to a site. The more links leading to it, the higher it is listed in the results page. So the first site may not actually be the most relevant to your search. I still like to use Google for various things (I love Google Maps), but I've started using Ask.com as well. Along with searching differently, it also has a handy feature that gives you suggestions on how to either expand or narrow your search.

The other thing that caught my interest was the concept of "Social Bookmarking." Basically, there are websites that allow you to store your bookmarks or favorite places online. This is not only convenient for you, as you have your list of favorite websites no matter what computer you're on, but it has great searching possibilities for everyone. Think about it...if you search a social bookmarking site such as del.icio.us, you'll get a list of results of sites that other people have already checked out and deemed good enough to save in their favorites!