Great tips, Kerim! I prefer Diigo over Del.icio.us though. It does almost everything Del.icio.us does but also allows students to actually highlight and add stickynotes to websites. At times some interesting stickynote conversations break out.

NextGen Teachers Skypecast with fellow bloggers and Web 2.0 enthusiasts Doug Belshaw (host), Aaron Smith, Kristian Still, Ollie Bray, Leon Cych and Paul Harrington

summary of our conversation about how we as teachers are using new technologies to collaborate with each other and our students to enhance teaching and learning in the 21st century classroom.

Part 1: What collaborative tools are we using? wikis blogging and Flashmeeting learning with your students working from home via a wiki pooling expertise from practitioners unlocking web 2.0 tools using diigo

Diigo*:[PR6] “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.” Web 2.0 style text-based interface, bookmarks and annotation using Tags. The toolbar gives highlight and blogging support. Update! UI redesigned. Some Features: One click bookmark with custom Tag. One click copy. Related Tags(+add and remove), Search(My/Community/Tag/Full Text). In page Advanced Search(Anywhere/tags/title/URL/highlights/Text/comments/without). Direct Links. Public/Private Bookmark or only notes/highlights, Inbox(follow user and tags), Bookmark username, RSS, mail, batch checked bookmarks( public, private, edit, extract highlights, send), Tags, Tag Cloud that is also a Tag editor. Image bookmarks have thumbshots(toolbar required). Cache copy. Tools: in page Bookmarklet (annotate, bookmark & forward) for IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera. Import directly from browser bookmarks, file and del.icio.us. Ajax Linkroll generator with options. Add to Diigo blog footer buttons and code. [button code]

Toolbar(Firefox 1.0+) features: Quick-D: a One click Bookmark with automatic tagging. Customize Search box-menu. Bookmark Status Icon that shows whether the current page has been bookmarked by yourself, an other user or has comments. Right click for highlighting and saving images. Blog This! button with support for WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, MovableType. Quick access bookmarks drop-down menu by setting a tag. bookmark to: de.licio.us, , Furl, Netvouz, RawSugar, Simpy, Spurl, ma.gnolia, connotea and locally. Has a good about/help page

What’s special: Space OR comma separated tags. Earlier/Later Tag navigation shows number of bookmarks. Private notes on Public Bookmarks. With toolbar: Blogging support for WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad and Movable Type. Highlight with visual options, Multiple posting to other social bookmarks. Bookmark Status Icon. Quick-D. Customizable search.

Most of the forums I use are built around small private groups but I like the Diigo Collaboration forum, because it ties in with my Diigo bookmarks.  Do you have a favorite forum?

here's Diigo, with communities sharing bookmarks, clippings, annotations, ...

The social annotation service introduced by Diigo allows users to add highlights and sticky notes, in situ, on any web page they read. Imagine a giant transparency overlaying on top of all the web pages. Users can write on the transparency as they wish, as private notes or public comments. And they can read public comments on the transparency left by other readers of the same page, and hear their "two cents" and interact with them.

DiigoOur current favourite for managing our bulging bookmarks at Mohawk. For shared bookmarking and social annotation. A life and timesaver for journalists, researchers and knowledge workers.http://www.diigo.com/$ - Free.

Diigo has gone forward to give a annotations faility along with the bookmarking. Here, you can select the text from any webpage ..highlight it..boom..it is saved on the server for later viewing. This can be used as very good reaserch tool. It is like you are reading a book, you uinderline the important things in an article for later fast reference. I certainly find it very useful. You can give a shot.

Diigo, which is my favorite and preferred method to store my notes and sources for research. Why would someone use an old-fashioned method of index cards or copy/pasting with a word processor articles and type notes, when all this can be done through Diigo. It’s also free, and I highly recommend it.

now I use the Diigo browser tool because it is so much better at annotating, archiving and linking to other communities - in fact Diigo has transformed my research recently because of its amazing level of functionality. This is another facet of working with web 2.0 - if I find something supercedes and is superior to other tools I won’t hesitate to ditch those and migrate to the newer development.

Diigo is a particularly smart tool in that it enables me to drill down to information I want and annotate it online quickly and dynamically.

Building a Grassroots Research Directory As part of my tag housekeeping chores, it dawned on me that the new groups feature in Diigo can be put to good use in developing a genealogy research directory.  I've created two groups FL Genealogy Resources and GA Genealogy Resources and I've been adding links I've already collected to them. 

This example shows the Florida group page.  Using the tag "cloud" on the right, you can select the topic that most interests you to see the links available.  The size of the font quickly tells you which tags have the most links.  Yes, this is a pretty basic directory at this point, but as more people join this group and add their own links it will increase in value - a grassroots effort.  My first group experiments are set up for state resources.  Florida and Georgia are my biggest research areas and I'm a native Floridian so I've got the skinny on resources in my area. I don't have to suggest a link be added and then hope someone posts it, I just do it myself.  In the process, I'm adding value for all researchers.  Tagging sites like Diigo give us the opportunity to share our knowledge with those we know - and those we don't.  With little effort on our part, we can build a valuable research network letting everyone participate and benefit from the results.

Improving on the Grassroots Directory In my earlier article about using Diigo as a research directory, I described their Groups feature and how useful it is for family research.  Well, it just got better.  Diigo has added a forum capability to their Groups platform.  In addition to collecting links - with the associated sticky notes and highlights - group members can post notes and ask questions in the forum. 

Personally I found Diigo www.diigo.com to be the most delightful and one step ahead. This fun tool allows you to highlight, bookmark and forward, any content from any site on planet Web. Even better, you can actually add a sticky note with your comments for either public or private viewing. This is in addition to all the regular features of a wiki – creating groups, shared content, collaborating on files and projects etc. You do need to download the tool bar which comes in all popular browser versions. I spent a most happy half hour, sticking notes on random web sites, but am sure it can be put to more productive use. Public comments are monitored by an editing team.

Web 2.0 services are generating what is truly a personal learning renaissance.Here's a comment from teacher Elizabeth Davis at Classroom 2.0:"Following and reading blogs, participating in ning, contributing to wikis, writing in my blog, I haven't thought this much in years. It truly is an amazing phenomenon. I feel so intellectually alive. I'm inspired and challenged constantly. The blogs I read lead me to question and explore new tools and Websites. I haven't written this much since I was in school. It is all so exciting and energizing. For me, classroom 2.0 could just be about my own growth and learning and that would be enough."A good example of a free Web 2.0 service is Wikispaces. Here's a class wiki made with the service - A Broken World, the World War I wiki of a Grade 9 class. Their teacher comments:You are now "textbook writers." Your goal is to make a better, more interesting textbook than that overweight, boring, 20th Century history textbook you're now using. And to do work of such high quality that you can include it on your resume as another example of your academic skills in your "digital portfolio."Here are some other School 2.0 online services:* Diigo- for "social bookmarking" of Web sources.* Blogger - to create a class weblog.* Ning - to build your own social network]

Diigo The web it seems is becoming only the surface of what is there. For a while we have had social bookmarking, but I recently found a new tool called Diigo which allows for social annotation. Diigo provides for social tagging as well but what sets it apart is the ability to add annotations to your view of a web site. Simply highlight some text, right click select the item "Add Sticky note" and leave an annotation. Mark the annotation, public, private or share it with a group who will see it if they are logged into Diigo and go to the site where annotations have been left by other group members.This creates a remarkable social space which well facilitates discussions on academic papers, family sites, software and many other things. One of my new favourite tools.

Trust is communal: Trust is now created in a wiki-way. The social tools of 2.0 (eg diigo) make it ever easier for people to share what they think of a product or a supplier with their community, rapidly and in a way that is much more readily trusted by most consumers than old-style marketing messages. Sony tells you its PlayStation 3 is the dog's. The community tells them its made a heap of mistakes (1.1m views on YouTube of How to Kill a Brand 1.1m of PS3 vs Wii - apple style). How does your shop help the community decide what to trust?

Those of you, that used Diigo for the administration of their sources of Internet, I would like to refer to a very interesting new function, the possibility, of furnishing groups. Within these groups you can collect together with other sources to a certain topic and furnish even a forum, within whose framework to the appropriate article opinions can be exchanged. That offers numerous potenzielle use possibilities within the ranges school, teachings and research. This all more than - as you an instructive Flash Tutorial shows - which is very easy application. Who with Diigo is new and itself more broadly about this service and its use to inform would like, finds here, likewise in the form of Flash Tutorials, thus to small films, all necessary guidances. I can only recommend to you to try Diigo out once; it is for me at present best service of this kind in the Web.

A better way to remember your online research April 15th, 2007 · No Comments How often have you found yourself scouring the web for information on a specific topic only to forget which websites you’ve visited and what information was valuable? That’s where I find myself a lot of times when I do online research. Whether that’s compiling a list of pros/cons for all the content management solutions out there to gathering data to write a paper, inevitably I forget something. You know how it is, you sit there and you scratch your head knowing there’s a reason you came to the conclusion you did, but can’t remember what it was. To everyone out there like feels my pain, I want to introduce you to Diigo. Here’s a brief rundown of what it does (as it relates to online research). Highlights text on web pages to make them stand out. Add comments to highlighted text or to the web page overall. Provides a central location to view all your highlights and/or comments.

And the cherry on top of all that is that there is no software installation required. All those features are easily accessible through a bookmarklet. If you prefer, there is a downloadable toolbar as well. The beauty of Diigo is that it documents your research. Before, I used to use a text editor. It was terrible. If I’d visit an interesting website, I’d make note of the URL, any interesting text, and any other tidbits I’d want to remember. Then I’d save it with some vague filename wherever the default save location was on my computer only to never find it again. And I call myself a tech-savvy.

I diigo. Do you diigo? I diigo He diigo She diigo We diigo (Shouldn’t you diigo too?) Ah… Diigo, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways… 1. I love thee for the free tool that you are. 2. I love thee for your practical knowledge management style. 3. I love thee for thou art so easy to use. I click, I bookmark, I leave a sticky note, I see my sticky notes when I return to a website I have been to before. I smile and say…

These websites, and others like them, do a wide variety of things — but here’s what they tend to have in common: 1) They are more like software than like documents; 2) They are social, rather than solitary; 3) They are environments within which you do something; 4) They involve user-generated content; 5) They allow users to organise and tag content; 6) They are different every time you turn up; 7) They make use of RSS feeds (this will get its own ‘Thing’ - don’t worry). This is how the web is now. These are some of the things that will make your website better. Allow the users of your website to interact with you and each other. Let them provide some of the content — make it their own space.

People like to spend time, hang out, find their space, form groups, discuss common interests and contribute. Your website can provide those things for people. A Web 2.0 approach to your site means it’s not just a brochure with a cash register attached. It’s a place where people come and spend time.

Web 2.0 can also provide you with a range of tools with which to connect your music business to the world. Building a web page that has web 2.0 elements is one thing — but you can also join, use and adapt the existing web 2.0 tools mentioned above to help you connect with a community, engage in the conversation, and make and organise media.