Agglom lets you save and organize sets and ists of links. I’ve used it several times now for classes coming in to research. Basically, agglom provides a website where students can access the links I’ve compiled, while also providing small images of the websites. What makes this tool particularly useful for me is how it works. There’s an Agglom add-on for Firefox and a bookmarklet for other browsers. Here’s how the process works from me:
- A teacher signs up for library time. Organized teachers (my favorite) provide me with a handout for the activity. Otherwise, I go by what we discuss or what they place on the request form.
- I pull up any websites included in the teacher’s handout, each in separate tabs. (love tabbed browsing, see here for Firefox, here for IE)
- I search for other quality reference material, each open in a separate tab as I find them.
- Once I have a good set of links, all open in separate tabs, I then click the agglom button. The agglom website comes up, with all the links listed. This I find easier then the other method of individually entering the URLS into the agglom site. I name the set according to topic and presto-chango.
- When the class comes in, I direct them to Agglom and have them type the subject in the search box or have the direct link ready for them. This way, they have all the links ready and saves the time of entering the URLs.
- In addition, agglom provides a slideshow feature for all the links you have in your set. This is handy when doing my presentation to the class before they start.
You’ll need to set up an account for all of this. Agglom also has social features built in. Groups lets you create a group where users’ sets can be compiled. I started the High School Research Topics group to gather the sets I create for classes that come in for research. While you’re there, Agglom also has a “Coffee Break” page with updated news organized in different topics.
You can also embed sets! Here’s my set for Cancer research:
