Unsolicited Advice - Take a look where you're bookmarking before you hit save [Advice]

The strangest thing happened the other day. I took some copies over to one of my colleagues. They're for a unit that's coming up in a few weeks. Nothing he needed that day, but definitely something he'd want to find again. Here's the strange part: when I gave him the copies, he actually said to me, "I'm going to need these soon," then he flung open his file drawer and jammed the copies into the middle of all the other papers in the drawer!

"Don't you want to file that in your Social Studies folder?" I asked.

"Social Studies folder? I've got one folder. It's for my files. All my files." he responded.

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I made that story up. I get a kick out of making up plausible pseudo-parallels between how people use digital technology and how they spend the rest of their lives.


Here's a true story, though: a colleague wanted to show me a link she had recently bookmarked and when she clicked on the "more" arrow of her bookmarks toolbar, it said she had 798 bookmarks in her bookmarks toolbar. She said, "never mind" before she found it.

That's like having one folder for all of your copies in your classroom.

If you bookmark something, you are saying, "I want to find this again later."

If you put all your bookmarks in the same folder, you are saying, "I'm never going to find this again."

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In Safari, choose a folder:

In Firefox, double click the star then choose a folder:

Update: A friend on Twitter suggested thinking about social bookmarking. I'm just going to put CommonCraft's Social Bookmarking In Plain English video here and let you do with it what you will: