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With all the interaction and kind help that we’ve received from the education community, we’d like to recognize those educators who are taking pioneering steps in getting their students and/or their peers started on collaborative research using Diigo’s powerful features. To express our appreciation, we’ve designed a “Diigo Education Pioneer” badge especially for you! Along with that, a big “Thank you”!

So, who gets to have this “Diigo Education Pioneer” badge?  Well, once your account has been approved for the education upgrade and you have started using and sharing Diigo with your students and/or colleagues in an educational setting,  you can get your own in your “Teacher Console” area >> Get Your Own Badge! We have a whole array of nice looking badges to suit your own personal style

The outstanding social bookmarking and annotating application, Diigo, has announced the release of Diigo Education.

Diigo Education has the following features: Teacher accounts must be approved Personalized Teacher Console A teacher can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation) Students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and annotations, and group forums. To protect the privacy of students, student accounts have special settings which only allow their teachers and classmates to contact them and access their personal profile information. Ads presented to student account users are limited to education-related sponsors. Educators, especially those in K-12 settings where Diigo is blocked by Internet filters, will benefit from this version. I strongly recommend you apply for a free Diigo Educator account and/or check out the FAQ and Getting Started tutorial.

What makes professional development even more frustrating to practitioners is that most of the programs we are exposed to are drawn directly from the latest craze sweeping the business world. In the past 10 years, countless schools have read Who Moved My Cheese?, studied The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, learned to have "Crucial Conversations," and tried to move "from Good to Great."

With the investment of a bit of time and effort, I've found a group of writers to follow who expose me to more interesting ideas in one day than I've been exposed to in the past 10 years of costly professional development. Professional growth for me starts with 20 minutes of blog browsing each morning, sifting through the thoughts of practitioners whom I might never have been able to learn from otherwise and considering how their work translates into what I do with students.

This learning has been uniquely authentic, driven by personal interests and connected to classroom realities. Blogs have introduced a measure of differentiation and challenge to my professional learning plan that had long been missing. I wrestle over the characteristics of effective professional development with Patrick Higgins (http://chalkdust101.wordpress.com) and the elements of high-quality instruction for middle grades students with Dina Strasser (http://theline.edublogs.org). Scott McLeod (www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org) forces me to think about driving school change from the system level; and Nancy Flanagan (http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/teacher_in_a_strange_land) helps me understand the connections between education policy and classroom practice. John Holland (http://circle-time.blogspot.com) and Larry Ferlazzo, Brian Crosby, and Alice Mercer (http://inpractice.edublogs.org) open my eyes to the challenges of working in high-needs communities.