One Student at a Time

Of all of the online tools that I use, Diigo is one of my favorites.  I absolutely love using it to save my bookmarks and it came in particularly handy last year when I was working from 3 different laptops at the same time.  No matter where I was, I always had my bookmarks handy.  I also like it because of the highlighting and sticky notes that you can put on websites.  Especially with all of the online reading I do, it is a great tool for note taking.  That way the highlights and notes are with the site and I can easily get to them if I have to go back and look at the article again.

Diigo Screenshot

I actually used to like Delicious better than Diigo.  I loved its elegant simplicity.  I didn’t need all of the extras that Diigo offered like notes and highlighting.  But then I wanted to start using Delicious with my students and it was a disaster.  There is no way to create student accounts with Diigo and I even emailed them to see if they could make some for me and the answer was a resounding no.  In order to create accounts for them, I had to make them yahoo id’s and that was not going to happen with my 6th graders.

So I jumped ship to Diigo and haven’t looked back.  Diigo lets you create student accounts without an email and they are simple to create.  My students love it!  They save their sites in it for my class and for their other classes too.  They put in annotations and share the sites to our class group so everyone can see them.  It is a great way for them to share good sites they have found.  When the Egypt revolution started, I had them find articles about what was going on and share them in our class group.  Then we started class each day reading through the articles we had all found.  They often put annotations to describe why the article was helpful.  They are 6th graders so sometimes their annotations are funny.  I had to agree with dafa17, though, the Egypt situation is insane!

Diigo Annotation

In my own learning, especially for my #PLEK12 class, I am using Diigo to find good sites about wine.  Google is overwhelming.  I got over 316 million sites when I searched for wine.  In Diigo, I got many sites, but I also can see what other people have said about that site and how many people bookmarked it.  That narrows down my search considerably and makes the search manageable.

Diigo is such a great tool.  How are you using it?

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