Ten Reasons You Should Use Furl

I used to tell people that Furl was a site for saving your favorites/bookmarks online. That is still true, but it is more than that. It is your personal web site where you can store bookmarks and archive web pages. You can also learn what web sites others find interesting. Furl gives you 5 gigabytes of web space to store pages. Furl allows you to save anything you view on the web. You can also use it to share what you read on the web with other teachers or with your students. You can use it for many educational purposes.

Ten Reasons You Should Use Furl
1. Search your bookmarks by keywords and topics.
2. Save site found using multiple computers (home and school) to one resource.
3. Access your bookmarks anywhere you have web access.
4. Share web sites with your students or peers.
5. Export your web sites into a bibliography for college or as a handout for your class.
6. Access your bookmarks as your computer crashes or you get a new computer.
7. Publish your saved web site links by category.
8. Learn about new sites from your "Furl Mates".
9. Subscribe to other users' Furl who look for similar web sites as you do.
10. Furl saves a copy of the web page. If it is moved or deleted, you still have access to the pages you bookmarked.

I'm sure you will think of more ways you can use Furl. On a personal level, you can use it for recipes, gift lists, travel sites and more. Most importantly, Furl will help you organize and find the web sites that you think are important and may wish to visit again.

Using Furl

Whenever you find something you want to save while you're browsing the Internet just click on your Furl Button. At the time I was writing this I had 380 items I had saved to Furl.

I wanted to be able to find this site again. Instead of adding it to my bookmarks, I clicked on the Furl Button I added to my tool bar (Shown on pervious page). The window shown below popped up. (You need to allow pop-ups in your browser, use a Control Key, or make an exception for Furl.) Let's examine the pop up window.

Title, URL, and the Clipping - These were added automatically. I had highlighted the text in the clipping box on Alan's blog. When I clicked on the Furl Button that text was copied and pasted into the Clipping box automatically.

Rating - 3 is the default. 5 is the highest ranking you can give a site. You can search your Furl site by ranking. This will also come into play for "Furl Mates" which will be explained later.

Topic - I had added Blogs as a topic previously. In fact you can see I have added 44 sites on blogs. You can view sites within a topic on your furl.

New Topic - You can create your own topics or use the ones from Furl. I'm sure you will want your own. You can create this by school subject, grade or topic.

Keywords - These will help you search your Furl. You will be able to search by topic and/or key word.

Save, E-mail, Save & Email - When you click the save button there will be a delay while your bookmark is saved to Furl. Don't close the window shown above. It will close when the site is saved. You can now save web sites to Furl by just repeating this action. You can also e-mail the site and comments to your friends.

TIP: Topics and Keywords are the key to searching your Furl entries. Take time to add keywords and topics.