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Using Diigo for Organizing the Web for your Class 31 07 2007 A good friend of mine, Randy Lyseng, has been telling people of the tremendous power and educational value that can be gained from social bookmarking in the classroom. His personal favourite is Diigo. My preference is a social bookmarking tool called http://diigo.com. With diigo, you can highlight, add stick notes and make your comments private or public. (Randy Lyseng, Lyseng Tech: Social Bookmarking, November 2006) After listening to Randy praise Diigo at every opportunity, I finally started playing with the site (and corresponding program, more on that in a bit) this summer (I know Randy - I’m slow to catch on…)As I started to play with the system, my mind started reeling with all the possibilities. First off, like any other social bookmarking tool, Diigo allows you to put all your favorites/bookmarks in one “central” location. Students can access them from ANY computer in the world (talk about the new WWW: whatever, whenever, where ever). They just open up your Diigo page, and there are all the links. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Diigo’s power lies in it’s group annotations. That’s right, people can now write in the margins of webpages. You can highlight passages of interest, write notes, and even write a blog entry directly from another webpage, quoting passages right from the original text. Sounds great - but to do all that it must be complicated right? Nope. To use these advanced features all you need to do is run the Diigo software. This can either be done using a bookmarklet or by downloading and installing the Diigo toolbar. While both have basically the same features, the toobar is less finicky, and allows you to use contextual menus to access features quickly. I also find the toolbar’s highlighting and sticky notes to be easier to read. Ok fine… I can leave notes on webpages - so what? Here’s an example. I’m thinking about having my 7B’s record radio plays. I’ve looked them up online and found many scripts from all the old classics available. However many also contain the old endorsements from tobacco and other companies. So I go to a play that I’d like to my students to record and highlight the old commercial. If they’re using diigo when they access this page they’ll see the same text highlighted in pink, and when they mouse over the highlighted text they’ll get a hidden message from me - “I’d like you to write a new advertisement for this section. What other advertisement do you think we could write for here? Write an ad for a virtue or trait that you think is important. For example - “Here’s a news flash for every person in Canada. It’s about a sensational, new kind of personality that will make you the envy of all those around you. It’s call trustworthiness. Why with just a pinch of this great product….” They now have a writing assignment to go along with the recording of the radio play. Adding assignments is just one possibility. You can ask questions about the site, or have students carry on conversations about the text. Perhaps about the validity of some information. These notes can be made private (for your eyes only), public, or for a select group of people. You could use the same webpage for multiple classes, and have a different set of sticky notes for each one! Diigo will also create a separate webpage for each group you create, helping you organize your bookmarks/notes further! This technology is useful for any class, but I think is a must have for any group trying to organize something along the lines of the 1 to 1 project. I’m hoping to convince all the core teachers to set up a group page for their classes, and organize their book marks there! I’ve already started one for my 7B Language Arts Class! One of the first questions I was asked when I started looking at this site, and more importantly at the bookmarklets and toolbar was is it secure? Will it bring spyware onto our systems? How about stability? I’ve currently been running the Diigo bookmarklet and toolbar on 3 different browsers, Explorer, Firefox, and Safari (sorry, there’s no Safari toolbar yet), across 4 different computers and 2 different platforms with no problems. I’ve also run every virus and spyware scan I can think of, everything checks out clean. I’ve also done an extensive internet check, and can’t find any major problems reported by anyone else. To my mind it’s an absolutely fantastic tool for use in the classroom. Thanks Diigo! And thanks Randy for pointing me in the right direction!

Diigo defines itself as Social Annotation: the best way to collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere Diigo provides a basic toolbar from which all features are accessed. Clicking on the Diigo button immediately opens up a bookmarking window. Having such quick access is very handy. The bookmarking window offers all the basics: url, title, Tags, Public/Private (public means your bookmark is visible by others), Unread (bookmark something and come back later to read more), Add elsewhere (Diigo allows integration with other bookmarking services). Additionally, Diigo displays existing comments, and lets you add your own comments. The bookmarking service integration can be improved. Diigo doesn’t automatically login to the service. A popup login screen is provided for each service selected. This is laborious. There needs to be automatic integration so it seems seamless. Current integration is available with del.icio.us, blinklist, rawsugar, netvouz, shadows, furl, simply, spurl and yahoo. The comments is where Diigo begins to diverge from other services. Comments are public and visible by all Diigo users. The purpose of comments is to leave short thoughts about a site that will provide useful to other users. Comments are view when using Diigo to bookmark a page. A commenter on the Yahoo page wisely noted: Diigo really needs a function to thumb up/thumb down the comments for pages. This will get spammy, really, really quick. This is true and needs to be addressed by Diigo.

When I go to bookmark a page, I can also highlight text and Diigo will save it. So in the process of research, if there is a key paragraph about the topic I am researching, I can highlight the paragraph and then bookmark the page. As long as I am logged in to Diigo, every time I visit that page, that paragraph will be highlighted. Diigo gives options on the various kind of highlighting available. On my Diigo homepage, both comments and highlights are posted underneath each bookmarked site for easy reference. All tags are shown on my homepage as a tag cloud. I can switch this to a list. Each mode can be viewed alphabetically or by frequency. The really cool thing about tags in Diigo is the ability to easily edit them. I can easily choose a tag and rename or even delete it. This task is made too difficult by other services. My own bookmarks can be viewed either from the Diigo website or from the Diigo toolbar. The toolbar lets me filter my bookmarks by tag so I can easily find what I am looking for. I can also choose to filter bookmarks by the entire Diigo community. Diigo also has a powerful forwarding feature. If you find a website that a friend would be interested in as well, it only takes two clicks to email the URL to them.

The power of Diigo comes in with its annotations features. I already mentioned highlighting above. Diigo lets users aggregate those highlights. For example, you’ve spent hours researching a topic and tagged each site with a particular tag. On the Diigo site, you can pull up all those tags and display ALL your highlighted text. This provides you an easy way to view your information. This is a great tool for writers. Saves times from cutting and pasting quotes or flipping back and forth between all the bookmarked pages to remember what was pertinent to you. Diigo also offers Sticky Notes. Sticky Notes are different than comments. Comments are always public and can never be edited (but can be deleted.) Sticky Notes can be public or private, can be edited and can be deleted. Sticky Notes should be used for your own thoughts. They can be used to simply indicate something you need to write about in the future, or type at length a response to a webpage that you will later use in an article. There is more to be said about Diigo. Another great thing about Diigo is a very user friendly help section. I printed the whole thing out. After the 30 mins or so it took me to read through the material I had a pretty good understanding of Diigo’s capabilities. The hardwork put into Diigo is evident. It has become my bookmarking tool of choice. Technorati Tags: diigo, bookmarking, annotation, research, tools 11.13.2006 @ 11:07 AM — Filed under: Social Bookmarking

Although i’ve called Diigo,a note taking tool,it can also be used for sharing bookmarks

To get the best out of Diigo,you will have to download either,a toolbar (IE,Firefox or Flock) or a Diigolet (also available for Opera and Safari).The toolbar offers all of Diigo’s options and the Diigolet lets you get the most of Diigo,on any computer that cannot have the toolbar installed on it.

it was very easy to highlight text,make a sticky note of the highlighted text you want to keep and move it around the page,or go to the Diigo website and view all of your notes to date.You can also put tags to your notes and you’ve also got the option of whether to keep your notes private or make them public. The bookmarks are just as easy to save,just click on the bookmark button,enter the url and a few details,click on Save,and it’s done.All i can say it is extremely easy to use and for anybody who makes lots of notes from websites,it’s a great site to use.

3. Diigo has shown a committment to listening to its users. Well at least the educational users, and they have been making small changes almost daily since Lisa Parisi held the elluminate session this past Sunday. Maggie Tsai and Wade Ren have been in and out of multiple conversations on Diigo and posting on edubloggers pages (Look up) to actively understand our needs and look to make changed in Diigo to fit the educational model… You can be offended by the “hate” comment Wade made, but this is his company and he wants to make change to satisify folks… I really like delicious since I was introduced to it a year ago. Easy linking, I can tag from a tool bar with comments I can build a passive network… But Delicious is not listening to folks or making changes even though they “introduced” their version 2 about a year ago, and it has not appeared. Even the tech bloggers are taking delicious to task for this. The responsiveness that Wade and Maggie have shown so far is really impressive in my opinion. Just wanted to share my thoughts on why I am continuing to investigate and use Diigo. I know that you feel a bit targeted for “not drinking the coolaid” but I think what you are getting hit hard on is if you don’t like the service you do not have to use it. Or with the participation Wade and Maggie are showing get involved and see if it can become what you would like to see… Just my thoughts, Scott

# Scott Weidigon 02 Apr 2008 at 10:27 pm Jim, I went to post this on Diigo and then hit my back space and went to a different page and lost everything boo… but I thought that I would post here instead. I am becoming more enamored over time with Diigo. At first I didn’t get the hoopla… I don’t “do” facebooks and myspaces etc. and I have enough of a hard time keeping up with twitter (don’t know how coolcatteacher and Dembo follow 1000+ folks… ) so I didn’t think much of the social side. But it could host links and re-post them to delicious so not too bad… here is what is changing my mind. 1. Bookmarking… on one hand it is the same as delicious tags yadda yadda… but I can now tag a s ite, send it to friends in the diigo network and outside of it, forward it to a specific topic group and throw it into a specifically designed list at the same time! That is efficient in my mind. the Twit thing is neat too so I don’t have to tinyurl it and post to twitter… and I can even keep my delicious account updated through Diigo so I don’t have to do double work… (and when i imported it brough my delicious notes that was a nice touch)

2. Annotation/stikites/highlighting. We all research and move information into different places, google notebook, MS OneNote, Zoho Notobook… but those pieces of information are then only our notes and ideas… Diigo’s highlighint and annotation allows you to make any page a conversational document. That is powerful. I just played with it for the first time today and was blown away with ease at which you could do this. those notes can then be seen by any diigo user. The collaborative possibilities are astounding. if you have not tried this or seen it go to http://lisaslingo.blogspot.com and scroll down to the Best Day Ever post. If you have your Diigo sidebar open you will see two notes, and the Highlighing that Steve Kimmel did. Also, I don’t know if it is showing up yet I tagged a sticky note next to the first picture there… my comments appear in the side bar, but I see the note markup and I am thinking others will to eventually, but am not sure. Think of all the times your teachers ahve been trying to teach textmarking but can’t in the Textbooks… now we can do this to the web.

I have only used 1 product in this genre: Google Notebook. In my experience it integrates tightly with Firefox, has a right click contextual menu option, ability to publicize or privatize multiple notebooks, etc.

I use Google Notebook, which is essentially the same thing. It has really helped me and changed the way I browse.

Sometimes bookmarking something you want to reference later doesn't quite do the trick since the page might change or you just can't remember what it was you found so interesting.

Strongly Recommend: Use Diigo! According to our surveys, many oD readers are involved in research in some form or other: as students or academics or media-folk or policy makers and influencers. So here is a recommendation that might well change the quality and usefulness of the web for you. The best research tool I have come across in a long time - it has really transformed my web habits - is diigo.com, which gives me the ability to make notes as I read the web, to collect all my notes in one place and to share the notes with collaborators. After joining, my recommendation is that you download and install the diigo toolbar - it makes adding notes and index-files of what you read very easy. It also has a number of other nice features that you'll probably end up using - for example, you can highlight a word and perform a Google search on it without any further typing, which I liked ... Once you have joined diigo, make sure you sign up to the openDemocracy group on diigo. Joining the group will allow you to see the bookmarks and annotations from everywhere on the web of others who have chosen to share their notes with the openDemocracy group. You'll see when you create a note - the options are pretty clear. Once you have signed up to the openDemocracy group, you can have a look at an example of the group annotation feature here where Anthony and I have commented on the UK Labour Party Deputy Leadership attitudes gathered by OurKingdom. diigo.com is the web tool I use most. I have met with Wade and Maggie, the brains and business minds behind it - I feel they really understand what researchers need and are working hard to supply it. I really look forward to using diigo.com more extensively on openDemocracy and exploring various collaborative experiments using it. More later ...but in the meantime, do sign-up to diigo.com

You’re browsing sites, left and right. You come across something that interests you and you say to yourself, “Self, this is something worth blogging about on your blog.” But you forget to make a note of why you want to write about it. What will you do? What will you do?

Another tool that helps me is Diigo (pronounced “dee-go”). It’s a social bookmarking site with abilities far beyond those of mortal bookmarkers

While viewing a web page — any web page — I can highlight content and also have it stored in my account. But I can also leave notes on that page. These notes can be for my eyes only, or I can make it to where anyone with Diigo who chooses to view anyone’s notes can view them. The purpose of these notes is for me to “mark” parts of a page like I would printed paper. Diigo says you can make notes on web pages for anyone who doesn’t have the toolbar installed. So, conceivably, you could point your visitors to other places and markup the content for further reading. Perhaps you’re commenting on an article that would make more sense to viewers if you could actually show them where on the page you’re talking about.

diigo TB works except stickies

A first click on the speech bubble icon, in the Sticky Notes window, fails

A second click on the same icon presents the Add Comment dialogue

Last month I lamented the fact that I couldn't find a tool that would allow me to use a yellow highlighter on web pages. I wanted to recreate the feeling I get with books, where I could go to a page and see all of my highlights and notes. Enter Diigo, which is giving me a most satisfying online highlighting experience. Because I wanted to make sure that Diigo really did what it promised, I started with adding the Diigolet bookmarklet to my browser toolbar. (They offer versions for Firefox, Flock, Safari, Opera and IE.) Within seconds, I was happily highlighting web pages and adding sticky notes to my highlights. Even better, when I returned to a page I'd highlighted and activated the bookmarklet, my highlights and stickies were right on the page, not stored in a notebook as I experienced with Google Notebooks and i-lighter, my two previous solutions for online notetaking. After a week or so of the bookmarklet, I moved into full installation of the Diigo toolbar. This added the ability to instantly blog material that I'd highlighted and quick access to some powerful search functions and my bookmarked sites. It also ensured that my notes and highlighting would show up automatically every time I visited a page I'd worked on previously. I'm just beginning to explore some of the more advanced options, such as being able to forward my highlights and notes to others via email, and I'm sure that eventually they'll become useful to me. But if I'm honest, it's the yellow highlighter and sticky note option that has really sold me.

Diigo goes a step further. Diigo is really more like a mash-up of social bookmarking and social networking. It is as if Facebook and del.icio.us had a child and named it Diigo. Like del.icio.us, Diigo allows you to post your bookmarks online, tag them and share them. However, Diigo allows to to create a network of friends and see what their recent activity is - much easier to see the new items bookmarked by your friends than in del.icio.us. There is also a comment wall which allows for friends to engage in conversation or discussion about sites. Additionally, Diigo allows you to create lists in addition to tags. Tags allow for a dynamic set of resources to be viewed. Lists allow you to create a static set of resources when necessary. It is another option for organizing bookmarked sites. You can also designate sites as favorites. Finally, Diigo allows you to create groups so that people who might have something in common can share bookmarks with the group that they think the other members of the group might find interesting. Diigo is quickly becoming a favorite resource from what I can tell by listening in the twitterverse. Good site to check out.

Thanks for a great post. Interesting “analogy” Like to add: Diigo’s web annotation (the ability to add highlight, sticky notes) to any part of a webpage is another very unique and core competence of Diigo’s offerings. As you read on the web, instead of just bookmarking, you can highlight portions of web pages that are of particular interest to you. You can also attach sticky notes to specific parts of web pages. Unlike most other web “highlighters” that merely clip, Diigo highlights and sticky notes are persistent in the sense that whenever you return to the original web page, you will see your highlights and sticky notes superimposed on the original page, just what you would expect if you highlighted or wrote on a book! Moreover, all the information — highlighted paragraphs, sticky notes, and the original url — are saved on Diigo servers, creating your personal digest of the web, your own collection of highlights from the web - ones that are meaningful to you!