Over the past couple of days I’ve been trying some new web tools and thinking about how to use them with teens.  Both of the tools I’ve investigated give librarians a chance to connect teens to web-based resources:

• Krunchd is a URL shortening tool with a difference. The difference is that instead of shortening one URL at a time, it’s possible to shorten a collection of URLs together and send them out as a group. Why is this useful? Because it means it’s possible to group URLs on a topic and describe and tag them all at once. Then, when someone clicks on the shortened URL they don’t just go to one site, they go to the Krunchd page that has the full-list of sites with description and tags.

  I’ve been thinking this might be useful as a way to get links on a particular topic out to teens and/or teachers. For example, if you want to collect a set of links for teens on sites about a new movie that’s about to be released, you could gather the links together at Krunchd, and then just provide one link to teens.

  It works the opposite way too. Perhaps a teen is working on a project for school and finds several links to send to a classmate working on the same project. The teen can add them all on Krunchd and then send the one link to the classmate. The teen accessing the links will not only be able to access the URLS on a particular theme, she will also be able to read a description of the links written by her classmate.

• Zigtag is a social bookmarking site with a twist. With Zigtag users bookmark sites of interest. What makes this different than something like delicious is that not only is it possible to access your own and other people’s bookmarks, but Zigtag also allows users to create groups and share bookmarks with members of a specific group. It’s also possible to start discussions within a group about particular bookmarks. And, it’s possible to add tags to bookmarks.

  Zigtag not only allows users to tag but connects terms to specific definitions. For example, if you want to tag a site with the term “apple,” Zigtag automatically gives you options for the definition of apple that you want to connect to your tag – apple the fruit, apple the computer company, apple the record label, etc. As Zigtag says on their site, “The intelligence aspect is that our tags have defined meanings, so when you tag a page, you are assigning it a definition rather than a simple word that could have multiple meanings.”

  With Zigtag it could be really interesting to setup groups with teens, have them collect resources on a particular topic, and discuss what they collect. Zigtag could also be a useful tool for helping teens understand how tagging and subject categorization works and how to make good decisions about tags, subject headings, and even keyword searching.

These two tools seem ripe for teen use when it comes to resource gathering and collaboration related to research and resources.

By the way, I learned about Krunchd and Zigtag on the Read Write Web blog – a great resource for learning about and keeping up with technology.