Group items tagged

I think their marketing plan to sell WebSlides as just another bookmarking tool is doing it a disservice. I initially could not imagine why I would want my bookmarks saved as slideshows, but I immediately saw the value of the app as a training tool. I could picture WebSlide users making a walkthrough of how to use a particular website, presenting the features of a new web service, or making a WebSlide show to be used in a classroom setting. WebSlides' value is not just in the way it lets you stitch together a series of web pages together to form a slideshow; it is the ability to add sticky notes, highlights, and integrated annotations to the slideshows that make the service so useful. In addtion, you can record and narrate tracks to go along with the slideshow or add music.

Diigo www.diigo.com Diigo is my personal favorite for social bookmarking. Users can not only import del.icio.us or other bookmarks, they can also update those other services using diigo. In addition, diigo’s informational video and screencasts—accessible on its home page—provide a great introduction to social bookmarking. Diigo’s secondary features include a rich set of browser tools that allows users to highlight passages and leave comments on Web pages for other diigo users to see (a great way for teachers to effectively assess student assignments). Diigo also lets you send an email or blog post directly from a Web page, automate a daily blog post of your bookmarks with comments, or create blog or site widgets with your bookmarks. Founded in 2005 by Wade Ren.

Diigo is my personal favorite

12/1/2007

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.

In the fall, I ran across a new social bookmarking site–Diigo. I started using Diigo with a paper that I was writing and loved it for several reasons. First, it’s a social bookmarking site which meant that I could peruse the links of other people on the site. Second, Diigo gave me the Furl functionality of highlighting and annotating, but the format seemed easier and the interface was more aesthetically speaking (in my opinion).  While I was in this stage of tinkering, I met with one of my dissertation committee members and I was talking about the focus of my dissertation–blogging. He very bluntly reminded me that my entire dissertation could not focus only on blogging, but needed to be focused on more features. I was in a bind–I wanted to focus on the advantages to writing that came from blogs, not all medias. But the more I played around with Diigo, the more a little grain of an idea began to grow. My dissertation should note about the advantages to writing–but about collaboration through Web 2.0

So, this semester, I went out on a limb and offered my students the option of collaborating on their research this semester. They were already not looking forward to the research, but the idea of using each other to further their research sounded like a good idea. Still, they weren’t jumping at the idea. Then, I gave them a quick walkthrough of Diigo. Their eyes lit up like they had just been given a present–and it wasn’t even their birthday. One student looked dumbfounded and asked: “Is it really that easy?” “It sure is.” I replied.

Students Use Social Bookmarking Just like I learned with blogging in the classroom, I know that students get more out of methods of learning that they use in their free time. So, social bookmarking was a way for me to engage my students not only in the research, but in conversations with the research. Social bookmarking, regardless of the site used, creates a conversation among members interested in the same tag. Each time a member marks a bookmark, they are speaking to their networks and saying “Read this.”

Why I am switching to Diigo from Google notebooks The context:  Over the years bookmarking tools have evolved with ever increasing ease-of-use and power.  Yet many times the migration pathway to new technology presents a formidable barrier to adoption, despite the desire for greater functionality. In my case, I have accumulated an archive of hundreds of bookmarks.  Most of these have been organized in the traditional way (folders, sub-folders) and reside primarily in my browser.  Occasionally, I need to dip in and find a bookmark, but flipping through folders and sub-folders or trying to remember and appropriate search term is terribly inefficient. First, Google Notebooks came to my rescue:  Google Notebooks provided a more efficient means of organizing and tracking bookmarks thematically, despite its inability to upload and convert my existing bookmarks, the functionality was compelling.  I made the switch.  Their excellent search engine provides rapid results plus as an added bonus it is incredibly easy to highlight relevant text from within websites.  Enter Diigo:  So why switch?  Features, features and more features.  Diigo is as easy to use as Google Notebooks with many more features.   These are the features that attract me most. 1.  Bookmarking and highlighting multiple blocks of text. 2.  Easy-to-use sticky notes and tagging form for rapid bookmarking. 3.  A powerful tag filter for rapid searching at all grain sizes. 4.  A method within Diigo to publish to my blog in Edublogs.  (I’m doing that now!) As a classroom teacher , I am intrigued by: 1.  The possibility of creating a shared resource with other like-minded teachers. 2.  Marking up webpages and sharing sticky notes with my students. 3.  The possibility that student’s themselves can mark-up nd share their thoughts with others students.

About publishing to a blog Right now, I am writing within Diigo.  I have set  up Diigo to publish to my Edublogs account.  So as I surf the web and come across an interesting website, I can highlight the most relevant text then right-click to bookmark, tag and write a sticky note to comment.  In the same drop-down menu, I can "blog this," which I am doing now. Here’s the link to a description of a joint venture to produce collaborative video for wikimedia.  This will go into my Diigo bookmarks with the tags, Web 2.0, authoring, video production.

An innovative powerful feature: It allows a group manager to pre-define a set of groups tags as "recommended group tags" to improve group tagging consistency, or as a form of scaffolding to provide models of tags. These "recommended group tags" will automatically show up each time this group is selected in the bookmarking window:

Many possible use scenarios. For example, perfect for teachers to guide students for a more structured group bookmarking activities. Note: special credit to Steve Hargadon of Classroom2.0 for making this feature request!

With Diigo, you can Highlight the web and Add sticky notes too. You can also access and search your findings from any computers as well as create groups to pool resources for specific projects.Enticed by all the positive comments from my twitter network and despite being a fan of del.icio.us, I recently decided to give Diigo a try. Last year, I was already looking at Diigo as an alternative to del.icio.us but I am now convinced that del.icio.us and Diigo can really be the perfect partners.After downloading the Diigo toolbar, I transferred all my del.icio.us bookmarks to Diigo but decided to keep both to still be able to consult the bookmark recommendations from my del.icio.us network.I have now set up Diigo to save all bookmarks to del.icio.us too, which was very straight-forward. I discovered that the automatic saves were not possible from del.icio.us to Diigo but saving my bookmarks from Diigo to del.icio.us meant that I did not have alter the tags published on My Languages blog.

I like the fact the each Diigo user has a profile, which makes networking a lot easier and personal. There is also a facility to join groups with similar interests in order to share bookmarks and directly send messages to “friends”. Yours and your friends’ recent bookmarks are listed as well as a list of recent visitors to your profile. The bookmarks can be public, private, tagged and untagged and there is a facility to share them as well as comments about them with friends and different groups.Diigo groups are god to share resources and good practice. They are made up of people who choose to join others who have common interests

The tags can be sorted by my usage and by community usage and are also a way to connect with people with similar interests. Likewise, the reader community for your favourite sites can be checked out easily and this can also be a way to enlarge your circle of “friends”. You can also Subscribe to the most recent bookmarks by tags, sites, or users, which is a great way to keep track of the latest information on topics you are interested in.

Diigo = critical literacy tool. Use for reflective writing. When searching a topic, use Diigo instead of Google to provide students with previewed, reviewed sites.

Classroom idea: set up a “tag” dictionary - it’s one of the options available when you create Diigo groups. Makes for easy evaluation: search a tag and then you’ll see which students have annotated the site. Concept of tagging vs. concept of list - You can switch list into slideshow presentation of the websites you have chosen from Diigo. The pages are “live,” not just images.

Alice Mercer and Jennifer Dorman are leading this hands-on Diigo session.

Once the students logged into their accounts they were mesmorized. I pulled up the Wikipedia page on the Dust Bowl which I had added sticky notes to. One student asked if students could add notes or comment on the notes that others have left. They started talking about all of the ways they see this being used in our classroom. It was difficult to get me students to leave at the end of the day. A couple of them stayed several minutes after the end of the day to keep exploring.

It seems as though every day I discover new search engines, bookmarking tools other Web applications that are intended to simplify the cluttered and overwhelming task of conducting Internet research. But let’s face it, most of these resources sound great in theory, but prove less effective in practice. Yet once in awhile I come across a tool that is inviting, intuitive and actually does what its mission statement says it will. Diigo is this type of tool. 

The catchy, quintessentially Web 2.0 name reads like a word from some obscure foreign language, but is actually an acronym for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other Stuff.” Though many enter the world of Diigo in a social networking frame of mind, the networking aspect is the core of the tool and only scratches the surface of Diigo’s capabilities. For teachers, a useful feature is the “watchlist,” which enables you to know what’s going on across the network through specific tags, for example “education” tags. The social annotation feature is the best way to collect and share online information from anywhere, and you can write about that information with the blogging feature! The first characteristic I look for in any tool designed to enhance productivity is usability; will using this save me time and effort? Diigo passes the “usefulness test” with flying colors. Plus, it has all of the information that’s important to you and allows you to share it with others educators. Perhaps this is what the author of the blog I’m Not Actually a Geek meant when he said, “It has changed the scope of what it means to be social.”

Diigo

AASL Releases Best Web Sites for Teaching and Learning

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