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If the Internet is your main medium for research, I believe that you know the importance of bookmarking and sharing your findings with colleagues to get the best information possible. Therefore, an online research tool will be very helpful in organizing gathered information while at the same time making it available to others for collaborative purposes. Diigo - a powerful online research tool fits perfectly for this need.

Diigo is a browser plugin that functions as a web highlighter, sticky notes, social bookmarking tool, and a social information network rolled into one. Once you have download and install the Diigo toolbar, you can start bookmarking websites, highlighting texts inside it, leaving comments and more.

Next, the knowledge sharing part of Diigo lets you share and discuss your findings with any available public or private groups. With Diigo, connecting with friends with similar interests can be done effortlessly through content sharing.

A powerful Social Annotation and Research Tool - DIIGO! Well indeed Diggo is the coolest tool I have ever come across on the web2.0 scenario. It is a social annotation tool, social book mark tool and a online notes. Fits good to the best researchers online, it is a team tool, that leverages the time spent online. You do not waste a single minute and not waste the time spent in finding data and loosing it. Find it, mark it, send it, store it, import it!! surprising, this is all accomplished by a single tool and it is so much under rated.

With Diggo you can be rest assured you have the data saved and sent in seconds! Once your fellow researcher (or a friend) gets online on the same page, knowing or by chance, he can see that you have left a message for him. All you need is, both of you will have to install the Firefox/Internet Explorer/Flock/Opera browser toolbars. These toolbars will make sure both of you do not note the same or miss an important data.

Not only researchers, or known friends, but also strangers with same interest can make use of (rather exploit) this tool and do wonders. Say for example a bird watching community is on the prowl for a rare bird, or the very famous Flamingos, they all land up in a page that has abundance of information about the Flamingos, they can mark certain text in the page and leave a comment. Say a professor is leaving a comment about the Flamingos, and their migratory pattern, the others can see this note, respond to it! Later people with the same tool (Diigo toolbar) come to the page can see the conversation that has happened on the web, and note that this page is quite popular.

Slides.Diigo.com - Slideshows in a Flash   Want to find an easy way to create slideshows? Then look no further than WebSlides. WebSlides is a Diigos innovation that helps you create useful slideshows. To create a slide show with WebSlides you simple bookmark the links of choice and put them in order by dragging and dropping. Once you have decided on the order of the links you can add audio, either music or narration. The next step is to simply press play and watch your slideshow. Your slideshow will have a unique URL that you can email to friends or post on your webpage or profile page. There is also a highlighting and commenting feature which allows you and others to comment on your slideshow. Click on the Diigo icon to add sticky notes, then others can comment on your notes. If you prefer to keep your notes private, you have that option and you will be the only one to see your comments. Create an interesting slideshow to share with friends.

Why it might be a killer     WebSlides is very easy to use, choosing the order of your bookmarked links by dragging and dropping is great because everyone, no matter how technologically challenged, can handle that. Since your slideshow has a unique URL address it is also easy for you to share you slide show with others. WebSlides can be used by people of al ages and professions, from teenagers trying to spice up their profile page to artists displaying their portfolio.

Using Diigo for Organizing the Web for your Class 31 07 2007 A good friend of mine, Randy Lyseng, has been telling people of the tremendous power and educational value that can be gained from social bookmarking in the classroom. His personal favourite is Diigo. My preference is a social bookmarking tool called http://diigo.com. With diigo, you can highlight, add stick notes and make your comments private or public. (Randy Lyseng, Lyseng Tech: Social Bookmarking, November 2006) After listening to Randy praise Diigo at every opportunity, I finally started playing with the site (and corresponding program, more on that in a bit) this summer (I know Randy - I’m slow to catch on…)As I started to play with the system, my mind started reeling with all the possibilities. First off, like any other social bookmarking tool, Diigo allows you to put all your favorites/bookmarks in one “central” location. Students can access them from ANY computer in the world (talk about the new WWW: whatever, whenever, where ever). They just open up your Diigo page, and there are all the links. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Diigo’s power lies in it’s group annotations. That’s right, people can now write in the margins of webpages. You can highlight passages of interest, write notes, and even write a blog entry directly from another webpage, quoting passages right from the original text. Sounds great - but to do all that it must be complicated right? Nope. To use these advanced features all you need to do is run the Diigo software. This can either be done using a bookmarklet or by downloading and installing the Diigo toolbar. While both have basically the same features, the toobar is less finicky, and allows you to use contextual menus to access features quickly. I also find the toolbar’s highlighting and sticky notes to be easier to read. Ok fine… I can leave notes on webpages - so what? Here’s an example. I’m thinking about having my 7B’s record radio plays. I’ve looked them up online and found many scripts from all the old classics available. However many also contain the old endorsements from tobacco and other companies. So I go to a play that I’d like to my students to record and highlight the old commercial. If they’re using diigo when they access this page they’ll see the same text highlighted in pink, and when they mouse over the highlighted text they’ll get a hidden message from me - “I’d like you to write a new advertisement for this section. What other advertisement do you think we could write for here? Write an ad for a virtue or trait that you think is important. For example - “Here’s a news flash for every person in Canada. It’s about a sensational, new kind of personality that will make you the envy of all those around you. It’s call trustworthiness. Why with just a pinch of this great product….” They now have a writing assignment to go along with the recording of the radio play. Adding assignments is just one possibility. You can ask questions about the site, or have students carry on conversations about the text. Perhaps about the validity of some information. These notes can be made private (for your eyes only), public, or for a select group of people. You could use the same webpage for multiple classes, and have a different set of sticky notes for each one! Diigo will also create a separate webpage for each group you create, helping you organize your bookmarks/notes further! This technology is useful for any class, but I think is a must have for any group trying to organize something along the lines of the 1 to 1 project. I’m hoping to convince all the core teachers to set up a group page for their classes, and organize their book marks there! I’ve already started one for my 7B Language Arts Class! One of the first questions I was asked when I started looking at this site, and more importantly at the bookmarklets and toolbar was is it secure? Will it bring spyware onto our systems? How about stability? I’ve currently been running the Diigo bookmarklet and toolbar on 3 different browsers, Explorer, Firefox, and Safari (sorry, there’s no Safari toolbar yet), across 4 different computers and 2 different platforms with no problems. I’ve also run every virus and spyware scan I can think of, everything checks out clean. I’ve also done an extensive internet check, and can’t find any major problems reported by anyone else. To my mind it’s an absolutely fantastic tool for use in the classroom. Thanks Diigo! And thanks Randy for pointing me in the right direction!

Ever wondered how to create a guided tour for a website, or an easy slideshow of a selection of webpages? Unless you try and capture a series of screenshots, and them arrange them in something like Windows Movie Maker or iMovie, it's not exactly easy. Thankfully, you will soon be able to do such a thing online (with live-updating website views) as Diigo has previewed a new product called Webslides at the Office 2.0 conference.If you're wanting to know more about this rather nifty forthcoming tool, then read on as there's video and more after the break. How do you go about creating a presentation? According to Diigo, "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 fact that you can annotate, and even voice-over, these presentations is pretty impressive, and we can easily see how this tool could find a home in education, client proofing (for web designs) and more. If you're wondering how on earth this could be useful, we'd highly recommend checking out the example movies found on the Diigo website (such as this "Funny sites on the Web" slideshow)

February 21, 2007

Zotero, Diigo and Research

annotated bibliography programs and social bookmarking sites, such as Zotero and Diigo

Diigo - Supercharged Social Networwking Tool Well I've just got on to Diigo and I guess it will take a while to play with all the features and explore, but it looks really exciting.Yes, Diigo is another one - a social networking tool/site. But this one is different. It is more of an Internet Research tool.And for those like me who spend a lot of time picking up scraps of info here and there on the net - Diigo is going to be invaluable.

Webslides from Diigo I got an email from Diigo to check out their newest coolest web 2.0 innovation. They call it webslides and it is basically an animation that presents your favorite bookmarks. Just select a bunch of bookmarks, add some voice or sound if you want to, and that's it. Now people can see the things you like.When I was visiting the webslides site, I got a 'knowledge accident' and stumbled upon one on e-learning bookmarks "Transforming education through technology"

Take your time to read the opening to the story below. Your job is to respond in two ways. 1 - Add a sticky note, using the Diigo toolbar, under your picture or name and  explain how you feel about this opening. 2 - Highlight some text and comment on part of the opening you enjoyed or want to talk about. Add you initials to your comments.

On Reflection  This activity was easy to set up - it is basically a page of text, the key thing is to have the Diigo toolbar (and class account) ready to roll. It can be done with a whole class using a computer suite for a literacy lesson, different children looking at different texts. The texts could also be in the public domain and they do not need to be narrative even. If you are looking at persuasive text why not look at the Alton Towers site and get the children to add Sticky Notes with their comments about how persuasive the site is. It could also be extended beyond popular fiction to include peer reviewing of children’s work they have published. (Lots to explore here I think) We worked between classes separated by a corridor but there is no reason why schools from anywhere could collaborate in response to a story or text. Given the right preparation and equipment I think this is a most manageable activity within a literacy independent session. My children had looked at Sticky Notes before but never added them independently - they catch on very fast and coped without any problems. Diigo with its “Highlight and Comment” tool can easily become a very useful online text annotation / response tool and I think I will keep using it.

I am pleased to welcome Diigo into my toolkit on a permanent contract :) all these ideas have been simmering for a while now and it is excellent to have the opportunity to see the children engaging and responding to text in this unique way.

Hands-on Diigo: bookmarking evolved By Rafe Needleman – August 1, 2006,

It took me a while to grok Diigo, though. There's a lot going on here, and like a Swiss Army Knife, there are blades that new users will find confusing. What's a customizable search bar doing here? And why does Diigo act so much like a social bookmarking tool--do we really need another one of these?

but we've evolved since then--what people used to call "graffiti" we now call "interactivity" and "community."

Research megatool Diigo will officially announce its new WebSlides for RSS feeds and Bookmarks feature at TechCrunch40 next week. The new widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format, complete with the full content, pages, links, comments, and ads. The widget can be sent to friends and colleagues and also placed on websites, blogs and in social networks. Each slide that is displayed actually registers as a page view for the content owner. Webslides also allows any Diigo user to annotate each page on the fly with sticky notes to share thoughts or to highlight important sections. Viewers can also bookmark, tag, share, and clip content from the pages in WebSlides for future reference in their own Diigo online folders. To use WebSlides, users enter a feed or list of bookmarks and add background music or voice narration. By clicking “Play,” the list transforms into a slideshow. There’s a lot of competition in this space, but having looked at the product I can see why Diigo qualified for the demo pit at TC40. A widget that includes full content including advertising is a good thing for publishers, and it’s the first slide/ widget I’ve seen that does this. Combined with Diigo’s research capabilities it makes for a great product. Video demonstration is below. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Diigo To Launch WebSlides At TechCrunch40 Posted: 14 09 2007 14:43:10 CEST by Duncan Riley Tags:  Company & Product Profiles   [edit]