Greetings everyone!

For those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving, the entire Diigo team would like to wish you a happy and joyous holiday!

Someone did bring this topic up in our last conversation. Anyone know whether there is some existing technology that we can leverage? We haven't had time to look into yet. Thanks


(note: we will be rolling out a series of cool / simple apps to be independent / complementary of Diigo shortly. Stay tuned...)

To create & manage student accounts and class groups, Teacher Console is your central administration hub.

Your personalized Teacher Console, located at http://www.diigo.com/teacher_entry/console, is where you create and manage student accounts and class groups.



Your teacher console can be conveniently accessed via the drop-down menu under your username, as illustrated below:



Pls let us know any question you may have for its usage - Improvement suggestion welcome as well!

Are you referring to sorting within a group? Currently with group bookmarks, the order can be displayed via "Time created", "New comments" "Thumb ups - group popular vote' We're evaluating more ways to sort such as alphabetical. Any input here?

FYI: if you use a Diigo List, you can have full control of the order http://help.diigo.com/How-To_Guide/Lists

Shannon,

Thanks for opening up this great topic. As we continue to evolve, we'd much very like to learn more with everyone as well. Let us know how we can be of help.

Meanwhile, here is our vision where Diigo can play a role in education:

" The 21st century calls for knowledge workers who can effectively utilize the vast array of information that resides on the internet and who are capable of processing the information collaboratively with others. Project-based learning is an effective way to cultivate the skills of finding, organizing, synthesizing, and presenting information, as well as the social skills of working in groups, all of which are necessary in the knowledge-based economy. Diigo is the perfect tool for this kind of exploratory and collaborative learning.

Diigo is an effective tool for teaching as well. Diigo's features allow teachers to highlight critical features within text and images on 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. Diigo also allows teachers to collaborate and share resources among themselves.

Diigo is much more than a simple web annotation or social bookmarking service -- it is a new kind of online research and collaborative research tool that integrates tags and folders, highlighting and clipping, sticky notes, and group-based collaboration, enabling a whole new process of online knowledge management, learning, and teaching in the information age."

Phase I educator account is just the beginning - lots of work to be done. We welcome your input and suggestion!

From listening to our users' feedback, we have now made it possible to automatically post group bookmarks to your blogs!

This "Group Auto Blog Post" feature will enable group member to automatically post your group bookmarks to your blog(s) daily or weekly - a super easy way to share your group's findings with your blog readers!

Check out the details here http://blog.diigo.com/2008/11/06/tip-of-the-day-group-daily-blog-post-now-available/

Some schools are treating Diigo like all other SN sites and putting it on its block list. We'd like to prepare something to share Diigo's key features & benefits & how it works to make it easy for them to whitelist diigo and make it available for educators and students in school.

We'd like to learn what issues are important to them, so we can better address them. If you have some insight, please feel free to share your thought. Thanks!

Bill,

Have you tried diigolet yet? It should be a lot easier (no download required) - and we'd love to hear more input on how we can approach / work with school IT dept. Thanks!

Great Toby,

After we roll out the next major release, Phase II of Diigo Education Network will be next - ie. a dedicated education network only for educators and students!

So, stay tuned and please do continue to give us feedback! Meanwhile, while we're doing our job of making diigo better and better, we'd love to have your help ~ please help to spread the love of Diigo and allow more people to benefit from our robust sets of productivity tools, and help us to grow this powerful knowledge sharing community, so everyone can benefit even more from the community collective wisdom!

(Note: should we be somewhat "quiet" on the user forums sometimes, don't worry! We haven't taken off to hang out on the beach :-) With your input, we're doing active listening and thinking. Our entire team has been working hard not only on the next rounds of new releases,we are also busy helping the migration of Furl users to Diigo - many are also educators :-) While we really love to be responsive and interact with our users whenever we can, we are a small team (with big ambition :-) , and everyone juggles multiple tasks. Given our limited bandwidth, there are time that we just need to concentrate on getting our work done. Thanks for your understanding and continued support.

So, keep the conversations & feedback coming. Together let's make Diigo better and better :-)

Q: How to set my group email alert preference?

A: Two easy ways to set your email notification preference (Not subscribed, Weekly, Daily, or Immediately)

1) Under each email, you will see this footer message:

You received this message because you are a member of the xxx group.
Your setting indicates that new additions to the group should be sent to you - Weekly
Click to change to: Daily, Immediately, Not subscribed

Just click the link (make sure that you're signed into Diigo) and set your own preference.

Or, 2) Go to each group, upper right hand corner, click "Edit My Membership" >> "Subscribe Group" tab to set your group digest email alert preference setting

Jan's annual Top 100 tools for learning 2008 vote will be closing Oct 31.
http://c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/top100.html

Please take a little time to vote for your favorites (hopefully also include Diigo :-) Thanks!

Super, thanks Melanie!

Here are a few more:

http://www.slideshare.net/cliotech/digging-deeper-with-diigo-education-presentation/

and please make sure that you check out our FAQ / Getting Started sections
http://help.diigo.com/Diigo_Educator_Account_-_FAQ
http://help.diigo.com/Diigo_Educator_Account

Diigo overall HELP also contains lots of good resources http://help.diigo.com

We will review and develop more training materials for the classroom! If you have any that you've prepared, please do share with the community here! Thanks

Sorry for my late reply - being very busy lately.

> Is there anyway to moderate what comments my students make on sticky notes on webpages? I can do it with forum posts but there seems to be no option on the notes.

Not yet - we will take this into consideration, although to enable this option will involve very complex backend changes.


> Can I lock the accounts from being able to add friends or groups from outside the ones that I set up? I'd prefer to restrict them to just the school's groups (at least at first). If I can, then I don't see a problem with allowing all pupils (even those under 13) from being able to personalise their profiles.
>

To clarify for everyone: here is what the current Phase I allows: students (ie. student accounts created by teacher via the educator account) can only invite / send "friend invites" through email (ie. people that they already know) and no one else (except their teacher / students friends) can send friend request to them. They can however join a public group.

We will discuss your feedback for our future release. We know that Phase I is not "perfect" yet, although it addresses some of the most major concerns to help teachers / students get started - we are doing a phase-approach development to observe & clearly define teachers / students true needs (not just "wishlists") , so that the "final" version will truly be a community-engaged solution that fits the needs of many.

Currently, if you use toolbar, you can filter annotations via the sidebar: This URL >> Annotations >> See group only.

We will implement / enable a "on-the-page" view annotations filter (ie. all, private, or group-specific only) in our next toolbar release update.

View Annotation Filter is now available on the latest Diigo toolbars (Firefox and IE), so that you can view all, private, group specific annotations, or none on the page!

http://blog.diigo.com/2008/11/08/diigo-firefox-toolbar-change-log-ver-3165/

Check it out.

While student accounts that you have created automatically become your friends to facility easier communication with your students, few educators have suggested that they would prefer to keep their personal / professional activities from their students. We will take these feedback into consideration for our next phase development.

Meanwhile, if this is a concern for you, here is one simple solution that we would recommend:

Please create another user account, especially to be used for instruction with your students. Make sure that instruction account is upgraded as an Educator account (ie. once created, please submit another application so we can help you to activate.)

Got a classroom setup question:

"Can I set student accounts so that they can only send and receive messages from me (not to each other?)"

The answer is YES! Here is how:

When you create a new class group, make sure that you uncheck the last box (Group members as friends?) ==> ie. Don't make every member automatically becomes friends with one another

However, even if you select this option, students can still participate together in the class group forum discussions, so it won't hinder their collaboration in class.

===============

The choice is yours during setup. Let us know what you think

Notice a new bug triggered by the latest change: "Share to class group" not showing up properly on the bookmarking window.

Got it... we need to make a quick change on toolbar to sync the class group data.

Meanwhile, here is a simple workaround:

Just restart your browser, or logout / login again. Your class group data should be synced. If you still have problem, please let us know.

Sync issue resolved. If you notice anything, please kindly report.

Based on some recent feedback, we've just made these adjustments:

1) You can now delete your own student accounts in Teacher Console. Please exercise the deletion action with great discretion. Once deleted, we cannot assist you to recover!

2) When you create new student account, we now give you two options for student account setup:

a) Completely disable personal profile info section for these student(s) (required for students under 13)

b) Allow students to fill out personal profile info section (optional). And even if filled out, only visible to their friends.

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Also, keep in mind, for all student accounts, they can only communicate with their friends and teachers. No one except their friends can send message, group invite, or write on their profile wall. In either a) or b), student profiles will not be indexed for People Search within Diigo, nor made available to public search engines.

Give it a try (ie. create a new student) and let us know what you think

If you already have created some student accounts prior to these new changes, and wish to have your students' personal info section completely disabled, please send us a private email and advise their usernames. We'll assist you.

Welcome everyone! It's great to have your participation!

Since Diigo's inception, we've been very blessed by the kind help we've received from many of our users, ranging from active bug reporting and feature suggestions, to words of encouragement. It's quite gratifying to know that our work is making a difference and being appreciated, as software development really takes tremendous amount of hard work, dedication, and passion for "perfection"!

Recently we've noticed that more and more educators have started to discover Diigo and are exploring ways to incorporate Diigo into their curriculum. We're delighted to engage the educational community as we also think Diigo's applications and possibilities in education is tremendous.

We'd like to invite you to actively brainstorm with us -

Phase I of Diigo educator account just released last week

http://blog.diigo.com/2008/09/19/announcing-diigo-educator-accounts/

While it's not a dedicated network yet, we've taken some important considerations from your earlier feedback and want to make them available to you and your classroom as soon as we can...

With this first release, we look forward to collaborating with you to explore the full potential of Diigo as an educational tool. Going forward, we will continue to work with you to define the next phase of Diigo for Education. And, as always, love to hear from you and let us know what you think!