NickTech.org - Collaborative Bookmarking

It has been said "Invention is born of necessity". This new project of mine was created for the purpose of:
1. Assisting teachers in cataloging useful web sites for class/school/team use.
2. Steer students to relevant and appropriate sites (guided searches).
This second point seems to be getting more critical as time goes on. Content filters only work so well. With all the inappropriate content, security problems, and distracting ads riddled throughout the internet, Google is not always the best way for students to do online research.

My collaborative bookmarking project utilizes the wonderful online bookmarking site del.icio.us and free software utilities which interface with the site. In essence this allows teachers to add bookmarks (or bookmark folders) to every school computer with very little effort. A school could collaboratively develop a set of standard bookmarks and categorize them according to subject matter. Students could then use the bookmarks to find relevant content easier and utilize internet time more efficiently. Perhaps even bring about the end of world hunger...
In the least it may stop teachers from asking "Could you bookmark this site on all the lab computers for me?"

The following are steps for setting up collaborative bookmarking in a school, classroom, lab, what have you.

Create a free account on del.icio.us. Use a login name and password which will be easy for your school to remember.
Install the interface utility on every student computer.
Windows XP or Mac OS 10.4 computers
Install the free program Deliwin for Windows XP, or Delibar for Mac 10.4. Once you open the program you will see it's icon on the top system toolbar. Go to the preferences and put your school's del.icio.us login name and password. Check to have the program start automatically on login, and reload the bookmarks every 15 minutes or so. If you are concerned with students altering these settings go to /users/"yourhomefolder"/library/Application Support/Delibar and change the permissions on the "delibarUser" file so the student user on the computer can only read not write to the file. There are easier ways of mass installing the program, and certain additional steps if the program would be used in an network home folder environment that I will not get into here.
For Mac OS 10.2-3 computers there is a great extension for the Firefox browser called Foxylicious which will allow del.icio.us bookmarks to be displayed within the normal bookmarks menu in Firefox. Just download the Foxylicious.xpi file and double click it for Firefox to install it. You will find the preference settings in the tools->foxylicious menu. There you can input the school's del.icio.us account settings, and specify that the extension should auto-update itself. Also be sure to select the top level bookmarks folder as where to store del.icio.us entries. It is good to note that the Firefox/Foxylicious combination also works just fine in Windows or OS 10.4. I chose Delibar because it is browser independent, and will open bookmarks in whatever is specified as the default browser on the system.
Educate teachers on how to add bookmarks to the school's del.icio.us account. Stress the fact that a bookmark is categorized on the student computers according to any tags which have been specified for it. In other words, it is best to specify one tag per bookmark based on what subject the bookmark pertains to (www.yahooligans.com with the tag "search_engine"). Another approach would be if a teacher had a set of bookmarks they wished to use for a specific project, in which case all their bookmarks could have a tag like "Cell_Structure_Project". Notice the use of underscores instead of spaces. This is because del.icio.us considers each individual word to be a separate tag. Also note that bookmarks which have no tag at all will be placed in the "system:unfiled" folder.
Educate students as to the use of the bookmarking program, which for the most part is quite elamentry.