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.

   4. Notebook would be a great way to use web based text for comprehension tasks. I have thought that if a Diigo account was used alongside the work in Google Notebook it could be very powerful. Signpost and ask questions using the Diigo interface (perhaps a single class login) and then children respond using notebook. So for example in a poem you might ask some questions for each stanza. (If you have a Diigo account take a look at Charles Causley's "My Mother Saw a Dancing Bear" where I have added some examples.) The children then respond in a Poetry notebook or something equivalent.    5. Independent reading tasks or guided reading of online texts can be supported using Diigo sticky notes and the children's responses formed in notebook.

Day 1 - 6th November - An Introduction to Web Design Here are the tasks for Day 1: Task 1 - Reviewing websites Using the tools from Diigo.com, you will review one website from the following list. Review the site based on the following criteria - usability, accessibility, use of images, quality of text / content and navigation. Highlight sections of the page that you wish to comment upon, and add sticky notes using the Diigo toolbar to record your opinions. The sites to choose from are: Wolverhampton City Learning Centre Wolverhampton Wanderers BVS Performance Systems Tally Ho Uniforms Oceanside High School Class of 1960 (added 06/11/07) Here is an image from Diigo showing student comments added to the Tally Ho Uniforms site:

Here’s how: use Diigo. That’s what I’m going to do, anyway. Diigo now allows us to leave annotations (”stickynotes”) on web pages that are not attached to any highlighted texts, but just float on the page as a little yellow speech bubble. So I’m going to put a private, floating stickynote on each student blog’s homepage telling me the privacy levels chosen for him or her. It looks like this:

–hover over the speech bubble, and it shows you your annotation, eg.: “full name, pictures, videos okay, self-moderated comments,” or whatever. So here’s the letter. If anybody wants to suggest changes, or collaborate on them, I’m all ears.

At the University of South Florida, Prof. Sherman Dorn is using Diigo, a social annotations tool, to guide students through the legalese. His shared notes can tell students what to linger over, or skip; imagine the time they can save on their reading. Diigo, which lets you "collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere," is also in use at other schools. Developers claim a unique mix of features. Check out a video demo.

Diigo- I’ve been using diigo and Mister Wong for social annotation, but mainly have used Diigo.

There are so few secrets on the web. Your competitor’s positioning, key benefits, product descriptions, and sometimes even their secret recipe may be readily available . . . right on their website. However, so few companies spend any time looking at what their competitors display in public. Try using Diigo to bring together your team and track what’s important and what changes on your competitors’ sites. As they put it, Diigo is about social annotation - it lets you and your team highlight, annotate, share & interact on any webpage. Simply set up a profile, invite your colleagues to join, and then you can simply visit your competitors’ sites (or any site) and make highlights or add sticky notes wherever you like. It’s remarkably easy to set up, as you can see from this little example from one of our favorite sites. When was the last time you visited your main competitor’s web site?

I wrote a “Guide to Quality Weblogs” for students to use as a rubric to critique each others’ blogs. It addresed every trait I could think of that goes into a quality blog, from theme design to post design, from content on the levels of the whole blog to content of individual posts, from connectivism via links to conversationalism via invitational conclusions in posts, prompt responses to comments, and more. I assigned each student to critique three other students’ blogs using this rubric, and leave their critiques not in the comments - who wants a comment for all to see that says “Your theme is boring and so are your ideas”? - but as Diigo annotations that only members of our class Diigo group can see. Again, “Digital Natives” my patootie: many students left good comments that rightly belonged in the “comments” section as Diigo stickynotes, again showing they have no idea of the very basics of this world. But they did it. We’ll keep returning to these criteria over the coming seven months.

Diigo. Takes social bookmarking / social annotation to a whole new level. It’s been written up in Techcrunch and CNet. No point in repeating the good news. How helpful is it to bookmark a Web site if you need only one sentence from that 3,000-word article? Diigo is a free bookmarking service that lets you do what we wish Yahoo’s Del.icio.us would: highlight text and comment on Web pages. Diigo caches each site so that you can search within text, not just the topic tags. And you won’t have to leave the Del.icio.us community, since Diigo lets you save bookmarks simultaneously in both places. CNet One thing about Diigo. One gesture to Diigo can simultaneously update all your other bookmarking sites. That may create a lot of duplication, or it may create the opportunity to connect with others across a world of tagging that remains fragmented. I shall continue experimenting with it.

Recommended Tool for Feature-Hungry Technophiles: Diigo Diigo has everything I’ve been looking for in a great social bookmarking/collaborative research tool—except ease of use. The tagging system is still buggy (renaming a tag or deleting it can lead to unexpected results), and the interface has some usability issues that I’ve already discussed with one of Diigo’s co-founders. For instance, tag clouds only display the first 18 characters or so of each tag, preferences on how to view your tags revert to default settings every time the page refreshes, etc. Unfortunately, Diigo is still too frustrating to use for me to recommend it to non-tech-savvy educators, but I hope its shortcomings will be resolved soon. If that happens, I’ll become a major Diigo evangelist. If not, I might have to embrace a more bare-bones bookmarking tool like Del.icio.us and search for a separate tool that just handles collaborative research well. Google Notebook is next on my list of tools to check out for that.