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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.

Web 3.0…or is that 3D? Posted by edutrails on March 10th, 2007 I admit that I have been struggling to even wrap my brain around many of the new web apps out there that others seem to be raving about…blogs and wikis seem almost old school as learners move to Diigo and Second Life….mostly it’s a matter of time, but sometimes I am just overwhelmed by the ideas of other teachers with amazing creativity and vision. People like Jeff Utecht, Karl Fisch and Clay Burell blow me away (links to their blogs are to the left)…how they find the time to develop their own knowledge and share with others is beyond me…but probably the teacher that I am most in awe of is Vicki Davis…Vicki’s CoolCatTeacher blog is a veritable smorgasboard of practical applications and ideas, but also has a real mix of great vision.

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.

Making the potion: Focusing on the research process

I wrote about reflective learning, and really identified with Will Richardson’s and David Warlick’s comments about focusing on the learning and community

Sharing bookmarks–another route other than wikis is to have students set up accounts on del.icio.us or Furl or Google Notebook, because these tools not only allow students to bookmark their findings, but to share their bookmarks with other students.  Diigo not only allows students to bookmark their sites, but annotate them, clip them, and share them on a blog, email, or album.   Bookmarking a collection of sites that they can use later conveys the idea that the learning is ongoing, that they can “add to” what they have found later, in a way that a set of notecards or a bibliography doesn’t, because they seem more “final” and product oriented.   And these sites allow them to network and learn collaboratively from one another.

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.

titles of notebooks could name specific tasks or children, to allow them to add the content in the correct place and for us to properly monitor and respond to what is happening. Imagine then a series of guided reading sessions during a week of literacy work, where children add the answers to Diigo set questions on a specific text - each child opens the notebook via the FF extension and navigates to the correct notebook (either by name or by task) adding their responses which are now labelled due to there location. Complete Notebooks could be archived into Google Docs so the list does not get too crowded over time.

In addition I have also signed up for a class Diigo account so that we can share annotations and signpost online text to children.

My Spurls-Newsposting have moved to http://groups.diigo.com/groups/webnews That's it, I'm leaving Spurl. I always was a friend of Furl, until their RSS-Streams stopped working for several weeks or even month without anyone fixing it. So I changed to Spurl, wich works well, but does not save a personal copy of the bookmarked site (like Furl did).I'm using Diigo since it came out, and I thougth there's no reasong sticking with Spurl any longer ... a Diigo Group for the news stuff meets my needs much better (URL: http://groups.diigo.com/groups/webnews).Anyway, who subscribes to my feedburner-stream instead of the spurl-RSS won't notice a differende. (The URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Medien-News).Bye-bye Spurl, and thanks for the service.

They also learned about social bookmarking as they used Diigo to locate bookmarked information.

DIIIIIIIIGO!!! With the power of Diigo I can surf the web pages and not only bookmark pages I find interesting and relevant but I can also highlight and add sticky notes of comments that I and other members of the Diigo Community can easily access and discuss. This adds more steroids to the standard web bookmarking technique. Instead of having a huge list of bookmarks which i cannot remember what they are anymore I can ad tags, make sub-categories and share with other members with my same interest. Plus, it has a beautiful name… DIIIIIIIIIIIGOOOO! If only a computer can echo so all my imaginary friends online can hear it.

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.

Annotation is Suddenly Fun Each semester, I try (in vain, usually) to get my students to annotate their text book. I do this to prepare them not only for future studies, but also for the annotation that research demands they do. Diigo, suddenly, makes the students want to annotate their bookmarks. It is their chance to make sure the world (or their group) knows how important specific words on a webpage are to them.

I am constantly learning things about Diigo. It’s great. Did you know if you’re a user, you could highlight anything anywhere online and send your notes back to yourself? I wish I knew that the other day at work! It’s quite useful.

I annotated a few posts from my blog to try it out and I am impressed with how organized everything is. I never anticipated anything like this. I wonder, can other people see what I annotated? Can other people comment on my work and send me their revisions? Even if they don’t know me? Technology is advancing so rapidly I can barely keep up!

Diigo improves its look and its toolbar! Already a great way to archive and annotate online pages, Diigo’s update makes using the service even easier.