Group items tagged

Annotation - Content Highlighting and Notes The key feature of Diigo is annotation. Users can bookmark a page and highlight text and images on the page to take note of. Highlights on a page by the user will then save and appear as a blue dashed underline whenever they visit the site again. Hovering over a highlight will bring up a menu where the user can optionally add a note to the highlight and make the note private or public. Highlighted text with notes attached to them will appear as a solid underline in blue. Also, if you browse to a site that other Diigo users have highlighted or added notes to, you will see their highlights on the page (if saved publicly) colored in orange. Being able to bookmark and annotate a page is very helpful. In terms of research, you can bookmark and annotate all the sites related to the topic you are researching. When your done getting all the information you need, select all the bookmarks in the “My Bookmarks” area and select in the top right drop down, “Extract highlights.” This will then grab all your notes from all the sources you’ve saved and display them on a clean page for you to look over and print. This is a great tool for bloggers as well. Gather up all your sources for a post your working on, add your notes, and when ready, select all the bookmarks and blog about it using Diigo’s built in blogging tool (explained below). Blogging I personally prefer blogging straight through my WordPress installation, but for those of you that want to take notes, gather sources, and easily publish a post to your blog, Diigo may be your solution. Diigo allows you to add multiple blogs to your account, verify them, and easily publish a post, however you may only publish and cannot manage old entries. What I like is that while you browse the web and you come across a site talking about a specific topic you want to expand on, you can right click and select, “Blog This,” which will then direct you to the blogging area where you can write your post along with that site being your source. The other method is by simply going to your bookmarks section and selecting a bookmark, or multiple bookmarks, that you want to write about and then selecting the “Blog This” option from the top right drop down menu. All the sources, highlighted text, and notes will be included in the post document, which you can easily remove if needed, ready for you to write. It’s not an entire blogging platform, just a simple publishing tool that works. Browser Toolbar and Bookmarklet The Diigo toolbar, available for Firefox, IE, and Flock, brings most of Diigo’s features right to your browser. The toolbar allows you to easily bookmark websites, highlight and note pages, search documents for keywords, search terms in a page using your favorite search engine, and it even brings all bookmarks right to the toolbar. The toolbar also is what makes it possible for you to see highlighted text and notes that you and other users have made on websites you visit. Bookmarking a site is as simple as clicking the Diigo button and filling in the tags and highlighting just involves you highlighting the text you want to save. One of my favorite features is the “QuickD” button (not in the above screenshot) that I recently came across. The QuickD button allows you to save a bookmark to Diigo with one click without needing the original Diigo popup to appear and adds a default tag to it (you may also fill in tags in the search box of the toolbar to tag it) so you can just click and go. What if you don’t want to install an extension to your browser? That’s fine because Diigo also provides it’s user with Diigolet, a browser bookmarklet that allows you to easily bookmark and annotate any website as well as view annotations on pages left by other Diigo users.

Like I said way back in the beginning of this post, you’ve gotta try this thing out to understand it. It’s not a solution to a problem; it’s a group of many solutions to many problems. If you ever need to share stuff you’ve found online, or if you need to keep all your clippings in one place, this is for you. Even if you ignore the other 99 new features, you’re going to like diigo.

Diigo Diigo is what surfing should have always been like. Diigo is a combination of many things together, social bookmarking, storing clippings, annotations, tagging, search, sticky notes and sharing of this information with others. It’s a great to store private web snippets.

History

Why We Like Diigo

use the web to research

as easily as if I were using a yellow highlighter and a red pen

mark up web pages

no longer need to copy

all digitally facilitated with the Diigo social bookmarking and annotating tool

shifted the way I read the world wide web

much more active

in the same way I use a paper textbook

scribble in the margins

"dog-ear" important pages

individually or collaboratively

highlight and comment as I go, building a path

snippets that I want to remember

return to what is important

information-processing is heightened

a greater level of usefulness

not tied to any one computer

private or public sticky notes

a powerful collaborative tool

message boards

automated email summaries

extract highlighted text from a set of web pages

create a personalized learning environment for any topic

"Extract Annotations"

replicating what I used to do on paper

all of those highlighted passages in one place

Diigo saves me a lot of this time

access many more sources of information

my ability to scan, organize, and absorb multiple sources of information is greatly increased

also see what others have highlighted or commented

when I search on Diigo the results are based on what my colleagues in the field have identified as important and relevant

Diigo is a tool that fosters collaboration and resource sharing

benefit from others' insight

faculty committees use Diigo

everyone on the committee has access to a growing set of shared links

such as ways we can build a more sustainable culture

helps to identify important segments

the more of an individual’s thoughts they include via the commenting tools, the better

thoughtful comments tied to specific portions of the text are more illuminating

localized comments

fruitful conversations

create your own groups for any purpose

feedback of other group members

discover new tools and content

When I was ready to collect

professional development interests of each teacher

exciting for me and my students

metacognition (thinking about thinking)

I used the Diigo for educators feature to set all the students up with an account that meets COPPA requirements

I had such a fun time

assess the students' work

really cool

like I was reading the stories along with each of them

kids used the tools built in to Diigo to demonstrate their use of the reading strategies that we've been practicing with paper text

showed their thinking

asking questions, reflecting, and analyzing the text by inserting these as comments

a powerful tool for supporting and scaffolding metacognition

deepens my thinking about the content

see how my colleagues have responded

my Diigo network

Diigo also stores a "cached" version of each web page you visit

the best tool is one that meets all of our needs all of the time. We believe that Diigo is this tool.

Diigo can also be set to update other networks

Diigo is a powerful tool that is literally changing the way that we look at the web. It has gotten me excited about bookmarking again.

I subscribe to several "groups" on Diigo

Several people have collaboratively worked on this article

Demetri Orlando

Michèle Drechsler

Sarah Hanawald

Beth Ritter-Guth