I tried out Diigo educator and was REALLY impressed. This let me very quickly (and with no email addresses needed) set up accounts for 30 students. I then created a group for all 3 classes to use and added all the students to the group. In this case, since I only have one more day with the kids and am not sure if they'll be using Diigo after this, I just used the 30 accounts for multiple classes, but if this were for my actual students, I would have created an account for each student. Anyway, once all the students were added to the group, I just instructed them to make sure to share every bookmark for this project with the group. All of the students will then be able to view all of the bookmarks. Again, we couldn't install even the diigolet, but saving right from Diigo worked fine for our purposes. They used the same technique of tagging with last name, class hour, and other appropriate tags. I taught both of these methods in a 45 minute class period and the actual explanation of the bookmarking technique took only 7-10 min. of each class period. The kids (7th graders) picked up on it EXTREMELY fast.

for long term use and for individual projects I strongly recommend using Diigo educator, especially since I use Diigo so heavily in my personal and professional web research.

I highly recommend Diigo Educator to any teacher!

Tutorials, lessons and guides to mastering the measurement concepts in math.

What it is:  Education Diigo offers k-12 and higher ed educators premium Diigo accounts!  The premium accounts provide the ability to create student accounts for whole classes, students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can easily share bookmarks, annotations, and group forums, privacy settings so that only classmates and teachers can communicate with students, and any advertisments on Education Diigo are education related.  If you aren’t familiar with Diigo, it is a social bookmarking website where students can collaborate on the web.  Diigo works in to a project based learning environment nicely and allows for exploratory learning and collaboration.  

Education Diigo is an outstanding place for students to solve problems together.  Provide students with a problem and send them on a web scavenger hunt to find the answer, students can post their findings and notes about their findings on Diigo.  Students can collaborate online to solve the problem.  Education Diigo is also a great place for “teachers to highlight critical information within text and images and write comments directly on the web pages, to collect and organize series of web pages and web sites into coherent and thematic sets, and to facilitate online conversations within the context of the materials themselves.”  This feature makes Education Diigo a great place to create webquest type lessons and virtual field trips around the web.    Diigo also allows teachers to collaborate and share resources among themselve. Education Diigo is a must for students who are learning to complete web-based research!

Maggie Tsai, co-founder of Diigo and her special guest, Jennifer Dorman, will demo and discuss the first phase of "Diigo Educator Account:" a suite of features that makes it easy for teachers to get their entire class of students or their peers started on collaborative research using Diigo's web annotation and social bookmarking technology. For reference: Peggy Steffens - "Diigo ~ 21st Century Tool for Research, Reading, and Collaboration" http://www.amphi.com/~technology/techtalks/online/nov08/bestpract.htm Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 5:00 PM Pacific / 8:00 PM Eastern / 1:00 AM GMT (on Friday)

A sense of community is created where people have a common goal, such as a project, or can benefit from working together. One of those benefits is social capital, as mentioned above. Another is increased learning.

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions.

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions. This can be made tangible by a rating system - some forums have thumbs up or down or voting systems for forum posts.