Diigo‘s latest upgrade has made it all the rage. My twitter is full of diigo related tweets and many, many of the blogs that I read contain posts and comments about this excellent web application. There is so much rolled into this one technology and the developers have been great about considering user feedback and have been active about their responses – they continue to impress me. I admit that diigo has probably catapulted itself ahead of Zoho and twitter and is my favorite tool these days.
Why would teachers use Diigo? I’ve been asked this question no less than a dozen times in the past week and I thought it would be a good idea if we began compiling a list of responses.
NOTE: This same topic is simultaneously being discussed over on my diigo. You are welcome to participate both places.
Diigo = Delicious on steroids. Why Would Teachers Use Diigo? http://tinyurl.com/3xdgm9 via http://www.diigo.com/~patrickhibbard (via @patpack)
RT @patpack: Diigo = Delicious on steroids. Why Would Teachers Use Diigo? http://tinyurl.com/3xdgm9 via http://www.diigo.com/~patrickhibbard
Diigo = Delicious on steroids. Why Would Teachers Use Diigo? http://tinyurl.com/3xdgm9 via http://www.diigo.com/~patrickhibbard
I see this as a tool for learning support teachers to use to assist their students. If a social studies teacher has given an assignment about Gettysburg, the teacher can annotate the web site and leave a sticky note with vocabulary words. I like the sticky note to leave additional directions or a question.
I plan to organize my bookmarks into subjects and share with other teachers in my building, graduate students, and fellow district tech integrators.
I like Dean’s idea of giving students a research project that requires students to annotate their sources. A lot of students really do have trouble understanding plagiarism. I once had a high school student who wrote out several pages from a website by hand, occasionally messing up some of the grammar. She really thought that was OK; she believed that moving the commas around counted as paraphrasing. In terms of learning the writing process, this could be part of the solution.
Michael’s point about the Facebook-like features are valid too though. If you wanted to use Diigo in a K-12 environment, you would have to do lessons about appropriate behavior using social tools. I think those lessons should be taught, but I can certainly understand why a teacher or librarian with limited time might not want to bother.
I agree with Chris that it could be a great tool for teachers to share resources, and in fact I set up a Science teachers group in Diigo yesterday. Perhaps more importantly it allows teachers to share experiences with those resources. If I have used a particular demonstration or animation from a site, but found something to be unclear or incorrect I can add a sticky and let other members of my group know.
As for in the classroom it, like almost any other tool, could be a hindrance or a help. At its most basic it could be a simple suggested reading list, or a ‘sites required for this course’ list. But there is no reason that it could not be used a way for students to have discussions about the sites used in the form of sticky notes. Or why not have students use it for research projects. Every site they use must be bookmarked and sections highlighted, there paraphrasing could be in sticky notes, might help students avoid the temptation to cut-and-paste as well as encourage the appropriate steps for writing.
I’ve only just started using Diigo myself so I’m sure that there are many features I don’t know about, but even with what I do know there seems to be a lot of possibility.
Teacher could build a library of websites
Example 1: Using groups for science teachers or specifically botany teachers.
Example 2: As the technology coordinator or curriculum director or instructional tech person or administrator comes across a website that ties to their curriculum it can be shared with the teacher. Otherwise it is emailed and then it would have to be stored somewhere. Diigo will streamline the process.
Keep Learning and Sharing,
chris
https://digitaleducators2.wikispaces.com/Social+Bookmarking+with+Diigo
http://www.bretagdesigns.com/technologist/?p=531
I’m not entirely convinced that Diigo is the best tool to implement within the schools. For example, does Diigo distract more than it helps? It has a host of features and can function much like an extension of Facebook. While I have argued that Facebook and such are not bad things, I think it is worth discussing here what it does for classroom management and how sustainable is it if a teacher or librarian had to constantly monitor it, which given the features would be a reality. With a combination Delicious and Zotero, there is little to no concerns from the perspective of potential misuse of the tool as the social networking components are minimal — non-existent in Zotero.
http://christytucker.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/diigo-or-delicious-for-beginners/
Beyond social bookmarking, I believe some of the research features Diigo has introduced make it a much more effective way to aggregate information collected from a variety of sources. This article give a quick overview of some of these features:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/diigo-the-end-of-bookmarks/6608/
In particular, I am a fan of CiteBite. So, adding highlighting to a Web page already bookmarked is more efficient to me in that I don’t have to keep up with it in multiple places. The annotations are a given. I am a fan of JumpKnowledge and Fleck for annotations and providing feedback to students. So, offering this within one product is also attractive. I would be able to keep a tag associated with my class (potentially private) to keep up with the annotated feedback I have provided.
While it doesn’t work for me right now, the ability to send your bookmarks to your blog automatically is pretty impressive as well. I believe a teacher who is out prepping a lesson and runs across a site she would like to bookmark and share with her students would be an easy addition to have it embed in her blog as well.
I’m sure there’s more, but that’s what I thinking of right now.