Group items tagged

First, the option to look up people in different ways such as their real name, user name or how they tagged something allows for better networking.  I also am very impressed with the idea of lists.  Although, I am still trying to figure out how to implement them, I am excited that this would be a great tool for the classroom use for research and or sharing.  In addition, I have just spent hours trying to figure out the snapshot feature.  I think I will break down and watch a tutorial.  However, I truly like to try to figure things out on my own. It seems to me I am just hitting the surface of Diigo.  Delicious does not seem to have as many bells and whistles.

I have always liked Social Bookmarking.  I wish we could get more teachers to network and therefore share tags.  If you had a set of tags that were standard, you could easily create websites that coincided with curriculum, standards and which time of year they were for.   Social Bookmarking is a great way to collaborate and find some great treasures.

Our work started out well. We read in class a section of Antigone, and that night, they annotated spots where they saw characters developing moral dilemmas (these dilemmas are our entry point into the play -- we will eventually write compare/contrast essays on modern moral dilemmas and what we can learn from ancient dilemmas -- more on that later!). Here is an example of one of their comment threads (with their typos and all!) on this quote from Antigone to Ismene, "Yes, I'll do my duty to my brother -- / and your as well, if you're not prepared to. / I won't be caught betraying him.

This is only one example of many where they read each other's ideas and built their own thoughts on them. I was thrilled. We started class the next day just skimming the play -- I asked them to notice who had a moral dilemma so far just by looking at where the annotations were. They could SEE that every character so far had some kind of dilemma. We were on a roll ...

Diigo in Writing Class

lets students personalize

and punctuate their own online work

Although it pains me to say it, I think there is something better than Delicious out there. I first came across Diigo in the summer and have been playing with it on and off ever since.  Social bookmarking has been an absolute godsend to education and Delicious was at the forefront of that - but, in my view, it’s been surpassed.

I had high hopes of the latest version when it was released at the end of July, but, to be honest, they just focused on the instructional design and look-and-feel rather than functionality.  You still can’t create groups or lists, or send messages to the people in your network, and you can’t annotate either.  All of which can be accomplished in Diigo and more

Diigo groups are ideal for team research

If you have any need for team-based research, Diigo groups are ideal for you. A Diigo group can be public, private or semi-private.

Pool and organize resources using group bookmarks

When a member of a Diigo group comes across a web page, he can highlight, tag, and share it to the group. In this way, group bookmarks become a repository of collective research. Group members can also vote up bookmarks so important information stays on the top.

Group sticky notes are great for discussion

When adding sticky notes, you can make them private, public, or viewable only by members of a certain group. With group sticky notes, group members can interact and discuss important points right on the web page, preserving the original context.

Group tag dictionary to enforce tagging consistency

The group administrator can define a set of recommended tags for the group to help enforce tagging consistency.

Diigo has recently launched an education version, where you can create class accounts and add privacy settings, so I recommend you have a look at this.

Oh, and for those of you who can’t quite leave Delicious behind just yet, you can synch the two so that whatever you save in Diigo gets automatically put into your Delicious account as well.

a lot of thought into the design to make it easy for beginner users to get started while satisfying power users’ needs

What it is:  Education Diigo offers k-12 and higher ed educators premium Diigo accounts!  The premium accounts provide the ability to create student accounts for whole classes, students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can easily share bookmarks, annotations, and group forums, privacy settings so that only classmates and teachers can communicate with students, and any advertisments on Education Diigo are education related.  If you aren’t familiar with Diigo, it is a social bookmarking website where students can collaborate on the web.  Diigo works in to a project based learning environment nicely and allows for exploratory learning and collaboration.  

A sense of community is created where people have a common goal, such as a project, or can benefit from working together. One of those benefits is social capital, as mentioned above. Another is increased learning.

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions.

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions. This can be made tangible by a rating system - some forums have thumbs up or down or voting systems for forum posts.

the first great thing about Diigo is
that your bookmarks follow you wherever you go.  When you
bookmark a site using your Diigo account, you can have access to
it at work, home, the computer lab or library.  The other great
thing is that once you bookmark it, you can share your book mark
links with students and colleagues and they can all have access
to your sites.   

The next big plus to Diigo is that you get
to “tag” the sites you want to bookmark.  A tag is the
classification system you determine so you can organize your
bookmarks and find the link the next time you need it; this is
known as a folksonomy. 

On the sticky note the teacher
could ask questions and Diigo allows people to comment and reply
to the questions on the sticky note.  Students could also add
sticky notes for other students to comment on as well.  Another
way to use the highlighting tool is that students could go
through an article and highlight all of the vocabulary that they
didn’t know and learn what it means prior to reading the
article.  Or students could put sticky notes about questions
they have when reading the text. 

In short, it allows teachers to create students accounts without the need for email, something that is typically a stumbling block for many Web 2.0 sites given that many younger students do not have email addresses.

"Students on Diigo? Isn't that a social networking site?"

Yes, it is, but safegaurds have been put in place with the student accounts that limit the social aspects of the program.

The most pleasant surprises that I’ve had in this course is Diigo.  I’ve been a Diigo user for some time now, but this class is the first time where the ability to make public annotations to webpages has lived up to its potential.  It’s amazing to me to see discussions emerging in the margins of the articles I’m reading.  Diigo is perhaps the most profitable way that I’ve found to connect to insightful classmates.

The new essentials: Top 10 school supplies for today’s students

In addition to standbys like pens, pads, and the ever-popular Trapper Keeper, today’s learners need a new set of school supplies, too.  These tools enable students to take advantage of the new learning possibilities the Web has to offer, such as making research easier, or finding better, cheaper ways of doing what they’re already doing.

Diigo — Invaluable for research, Diigo lets students bookmark and annotate webpages so they won’t forget why they bookmarked a page in the first place. They can also read other folks’ notes or annotations for further insight. Like any good Web 2.0 tool, Diigo lets them share their bookmarks and annotations with friends, too.