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(I-Newswire) - OFFICE 2.0, SAN FRANCISCO-- Sept. 6, 2007 – Diigo, www.diigo.com, is previewing WebSlidesSM, a browser-based player that displays any list of URLs complete with integrated annotations, sticky notes, and highlights as an interactive slideshow.  Diigo is also demonstrating WebSlides during the official Demo tracks during Office 2.0 conference.  More information on the demonstration schedule here: http://www.o2con.com/docs/DOC-1017. Diigo's patent-pending WebSlides, available at http://slides.diigo.com, enables a new way to easily create and share unique presentations based on web content and user annotations. To experience WebSlides, users simply collect and organize any set of links into a list, and add background music or voice narration.  By clicking "Play," the list transforms into a slideshow bringing Web pages and user comments to life. The player can then be sent to friends and colleagues and also posted on Websites and blogs. Viewers of the slideshow can interact on the slides through highlights and sticky notes directly on each page, without installing any software. This incredibly easy-to-use web-based software has many potential applications such as: - Create a guided tour for any website- Show a list of houses to real estate clients- Review a list of job candidates found online- Bundle important course resources for students- Provide a quick briefing, or a simple tutorial or guided tour on any subject- Share the favorite places you would like to visit with your friends and blog readers Diigo is a powerful, yet incredibly simple to use research tool that allows people to annotate, bookmark, highlight, save, and clip Web content that matters to them, for future reference or to share with others. They can also comment and add sticky notes directly on each web page, which are viewable by other Diigo users when visiting the same pages. About DiigoDiigo provides a suite of online research and collaborative research tool for individuals and small to medium-sized work groups. Diigo enables seamless bookmarking, tagging, highlighting, clipping, sharing, annotating, and searching of information to deliver a new level of productivity for knowledge workers. Diigo Groups also offer a simple and cost-effective platform for collaborative research. Upcoming releases will transform Diigo's powerful social bookmarking, social annotation and social networking suite into the next-generation knowledge management platform for large enterprises, through both hosted and appliance-based solutions. Diigo is privately held, and is based in Reno, NV.

It reminded me of the the review tools in Microsoft Word which I've used a few times with students - someone sends me a Word document and I add comments and suggested edits. The review tools can track changes I make as well as highlighting sections and adding notes in the margin. I can then send the annotated Word document back to the author and a conversation grows around the original document and our comments. When I first started using this feature of Word, I thought it would be great if you could do that with web pages. Imagine being able to get a class of students to collaborate on a web page: to highlighting sections, share their understanding, ask questions and add extra information. With diigo, that's exactly what you could do.Add to that online social bookmarking (which can be linked to other bookmarking services such as del.icio.us), the ability to highlight any text on a page and search for it on a range of search services using a pop-up menu, to blog about a page and link non-diigo users to your annotations on that page (this blog posted was created using the diigo Blog this tool) and a host of other features ...and you have a stunningly valuable educational tool.

I have also found Diigo to be quite an exciting tool and this year my year group is in a better position to use it. I structured it into an independent activity during a literacy hour with my Year 5 children. Using Diigo I annotated a set of written instructions with comprehension style questions and the children answered them in their jotters. The children were accessing the site using a class set of laptops. I wanted them to respond someway online but took a simpler step to begin with to test the concept. It worked very well and the children were well motivated and on task - they managed well with the new tool and took it in their stride.