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Here I illustrate how I study English with this tool in a easy way. With Diigo, I separate the process of studying English on one web page into 3 steps. Firstly, I browse my favourite foreign news website, mostly the VOA news (As it is banned in China, I use TOR to access the website), and find some stories that appeals to me. In this step, I just want to read some stories, not caring about the details of new vocabulary or grammar, noting down with Diigo the sentences in which there is a word I am not familiar with, or the sentences whose meaning I am uncertain about. After I finished reading the stories, turning to other stories if I like.

Secondly, next time I review the sentences of the stories I noted, and I could mostly make my efforts on understanding of the sentences. When I found new vocabulary or phrase, I post words or phrases attached to the sentence, which remind me what I need to focus on that sentence.

Lastly, I practice my oral skill by reading out the sentences I am already familiar with. In this step, I focus on correct pronunciation of each words. When I am uncertain about some words, I look up dictionary on PC, and correct it.

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)

the first great thing about Diigo is that your bookmarks follow you wherever you go.  When you bookmark a site using your Diigo account, you can have access to it at work, home, the computer lab or library.  The other great thing is that once you bookmark it, you can share your book mark links with students and colleagues and they can all have access to your sites.   

The next big plus to Diigo is that you get to “tag” the sites you want to bookmark.  A tag is the classification system you determine so you can organize your bookmarks and find the link the next time you need it; this is known as a folksonomy. 

On the sticky note the teacher could ask questions and Diigo allows people to comment and reply to the questions on the sticky note.  Students could also add sticky notes for other students to comment on as well.  Another way to use the highlighting tool is that students could go through an article and highlight all of the vocabulary that they didn’t know and learn what it means prior to reading the article.  Or students could put sticky notes about questions they have when reading the text. 

Michèle Drechsler is an “inspector of the Education Nationale” in France. She manages a district of 260 teachers.

What are the changes caused by the new technologies for the professional training against the KM (Knowledge Management) and Cops (community of practices) paradigm?

Teaching resources on line and Web2.0.Indexing, bookmarking and folksonomy