Battle of the Bookmarks

Jon Snow vs. Ramsey Bolton! Octavian vs. Mark Antony! Bat-cat vs. Joker Dog!

Salvete omnes, today's competition is less of a battle and more of a comparison. Nor are our competitors fighting to take back their family home, or for the right to rule an empire, or even to stop a fiendish pup from causing chaos around the house. Instead the contenders I want to discuss are ways to utilize social bookmarking for the classroom. So first let’s answer some questions.

What is social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is an online tool that is used for saving websites you find useful and/or interesting.

How is that any different from the bookmarking feature on your web browser?

For the most part it isn't, but social bookmarks are an improved method for organizing your information and also allow you to tag, annotate, and share your saved webpages.

As mentioned in the title, this post is a battle of the bookmarks so we will compare the social bookmarking tools that you may recognize, Diigo and Pinterest, to a small series of questions listed in the chart below.

Question
Can you highlight text in saved sites?	Yes	No, but you can leave descriptions.
Can you use multiple tags?	Yes	No
Can you copy and paste from original article to appear in comments about site?	Yes	Yes
Can others post comments on your site?	Yes	Yes
Can you follow others?  Can they follow you?	No, that feature has currently been removed. But you can create and/or join a group to share your bookmarks with.	Yes. You can follow people or individual boards that someone else has created.
Can you message people you follow?	Yes, if you are part of a Diigo group you can leave a comment on another group member's post.	Yes, by either leaving a comment or by messaging them directly.
Are you offered suggestions for related articles?	Yes.	Yes.

And the winner is… BOTH.

Having used and compared both websites for the purpose of creating this blog, it is my suggestion to you, my reader, to use both these websites in a collaborative measure and here’s why:

I have been using Pinterest long before I realized that I could be using it to create and develop activities for a classroom setting. I really enjoy using Pinterest. The inclusion of images really helped me explore ideas I had never thought of, or ideas that were originally meant for classrooms outside my discipline. Because of this I feel like Pinterest makes it easier to stumbleupon ideas. Whereas when I use Diigo, I already have to know something exists before I can make use of it.

However Diigo has a more academic feel to it that I find very appealing. And I really like how Diigo organizes articles and research based on their tagging system. This makes it easier to wade through articles and webpages that I have saved.

By using both of these tools together, though, you can find an idea on Pinterest and further develop it for your classroom with additional information you have saved on Diigo. They really are the perfect combination. So while it may not have been as monumental of a fight as that of Bat-cat vs Joker Dog. Maybe those two could put aside their differences and one day cooperate like Pinterest and Diigo.