The new essentials: Top 10 school supplies for today’s students

In addition to standbys like pens, pads, and the ever-popular Trapper Keeper, today’s learners need a new set of school supplies, too.  These tools enable students to take advantage of the new learning possibilities the Web has to offer, such as making research easier, or finding better, cheaper ways of doing what they’re already doing.

Diigo — Invaluable for research, Diigo lets students bookmark and annotate webpages so they won’t forget why they bookmarked a page in the first place. They can also read other folks’ notes or annotations for further insight. Like any good Web 2.0 tool, Diigo lets them share their bookmarks and annotations with friends, too.

Groups part of the name. In addition to having awesome annotation tools, it also has a lot of great ways to share information with others, formal and informal. First you can send bookmarks not just to other Diigo members you’re “friends” with (sort of like the for:username feature in del.icio.us), but also to emails (I use it to send stuff to my spouse who refuses to join a social bookmarking site), and to your existing del.ico.us account. That’s the easy stuff. You can also form more formal groups within Diigo. You can share bookmarks (with your notes) to a group, and it will appear in the groups bookmarks. It doesn’t stop there though. There’s a full discussion forum feature, so you can have a discussion where you invite other individual Diigo members to discuss a bookmark or just ideas for that matter, or you can have a discussion within a Group you belong to. Think of how you could use that with students to facilitate discussions around online reading. It takes the social part of social bookmarking to the next level. Some teachers have even used this feature to form study groups for students.

Diigo is a social bookmarking tool, but so much more. In addition to letting you bookmark pages, you can also annotate them. There are two tools you can use for this, highlighting and comments. Highlighting lets you highlight the actual text on a web page, and stores the highlighted words with your bookmark.Think of how useful this can be for online reading assignments in a class (no wonder it’s caught on with some high school AP teachers). In addition to highlighting text, you can leave comments behind, and even position them using floating sticky notes. You can use these to direct students to specific part of a page, or leave vocabulary or other tips explaining parts of text that may be a little complex for students. Just go to Diigo, sign up and download the Diigo toolbar (or lighter Diigolet bookmarklet)

I just stumbled upon diigo, which follows the footsteps of del.icio.us but takes it up a notch. All I was looking, was for a way to highlight content on the web. The web is an incredible source of information, and while doing research, I find myself going back to bookmarked pages to find code snippets or some other info. Besides being able to bookmark a page, I wanted to be able to permanently highlight something on the page. Diigo allows you to do this, and it is available with a Firefox plug-in (I believe they also have an IE plug-in as well). Here is an example of a site I was reading and wanted to highlight something:

Now, whenever I visit that page, the content I highlighted will always be there. But wait, there’s more. You can share add notes as well to your bookmarks, and you can share this information with ‘friends’ under your accounts or automatically post to groups you define. This is a great way to share information, you could have people in your enterprise subscribe to the groups you define and then automatically share everything in a collaborative matter. For instance, you could create a group called “Virtualization” and once you find an interesting article, comment what you need and push it to the subscribed users. This can only make the flow of collaborating information a lot smoother.

Diigo — Invaluable for research, Diigo lets students bookmark and annotate webpages so they won’t forget why they bookmarked a page in the first place. They can also read other folks’ notes or annotations for further insight. Like any good Web 2.0 tool, Diigo lets them share their bookmarks and annotations with friends, too.