block socialbookmark

About Social Bookmark block for Moodle

Social Bookmark block for Moodle is a simple way to allow your students to add bookmarks of different web pages and resources to a course page.

Features

Social Bookmark block allows your students to:

• Add new bookmarks to the social bookmark instance.
• Rate bookmarks which have been added by other students.
• View tag clouds which have been created from the most used tags on the social bookmark installation. Each of the tags which are added to the tag cloud have sized relative to the number of times they have been used in the social bookmark instance. This means that the larger the tag, the more often the tag has been used and the smaller the tag the less it has been used.
• Delete bookmarks that have been added by a student.

Installation

Installation of the block_socialbookmark is a simple process and requires no additional configuration to be completed.

1. Download the latest version of the block from https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=block_socialbookmark.
2. Extract the contents of the zip file and drop the entire block_socialbookmark folder into the moodle/blocks folder.
3. Navigate to your Moodle notifications page and you will then be prompted to update your Moodle blocks.
4. Then by navigating back to your Moodle course page, by clicking Turn Editing On found on the top right hand corner, the ability to add the Social Bookmark block to your course page will be enabled.

Adding a New Bookmark

When viewing the block, a link to "Add Bookmark" is available to each student. By clicking this link the student will then be prompted to add information about the link they wish to add to the instance of the social bookmark. The fields which the user is prompted to add are:

• Title - This is the main title for the bookmark.
• Description - This is a simple text based description about the link which they are adding.
• URL - A full link to the web page or resource they wish to add.
• Tags - Tags which the user wishes to add to the bookmark. The user can enter their own tags, or click one of the tags which have previously been added to the instance of the social bookmark block.

Rating a Bookmark

The process of rating a bookmark on a social bookmarking instance is very simple, the student just clicks a star on the rating scale beside the bookmark.

How the Rating System Works

The rating system which is currently used by social bookmark is based upon the average score for each single bookmark that has been added. Each student is only able to rate each of the bookmarks on the system only once. The student can change the rating they have given to each record, but if they change the rating for a particular record, the older record is then deleted. This prevents a student from entering a number of different ratings for a single bookmark.

How Social Bookmark Tags Work

To help students identify different bookmarks which have been added to the instance, the user is given the ability to add tags to the bookmarks during the creation process of a new bookmark.

Tags can be added in two different methods:

• By typing in the text title for a new tag into the tag text field.
• By selecting a tag from the list of tags that have already been defined for the system.

Tags are unique to each of the course on your Moodle installation. This allows each course to have a tailored collection of tags.

Further Information

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to get in contact with:

• Kyle Goslin - kylegoslin@gmail.com
• Daniel McSweeney - DanielMcSweeney@itb.ie