Diigo - Orgainze me Please!!!

Social Bookmarking is a way for you to save, organize, monitor, and access on-line resources. Social bookmarking is a tool that is available to any on-line user. You are able to save the URL or a screenshot of the first page of a website for future access. If you are like me, I come across several dozen sites that provide me with information that I am currently using or want to use in the future. And I don’t want to have to remember how I searched for these particular sites or write down the URLs and then try to remember where I wrote it. Prior to learning about social bookmarking tools, I would save the sites in my favorites. And although it worked out well with creating files for the variety of topics I was interested in, it did not help me to organize and access them as quickly and as conveniently as an on-line social bookmarking tool. Yes I admit I have become that person that expects technology to provide things for me immediately. I don’t want to wait, look, or spend the time looking when something can do it for me quicker.

How do we choose what social bookmarker to use? Well, this answer is up to you and your preferences. There are many social bookmarkers out there but for the purpose of not overwhelming us, I will briefly discuss Diigo. Other bookmarking tools to check out are LiveBinder, and Sqworl. All three of these bookmarking tools are easy to set up and easy to use.

Diigo has been around for awhile. After the bookmarking tool Delicious (2003) popularized the use of on-line book marking tools, Diigo (2006) followed in its footsteps with its popularity.

Diigo allows you to save the URL from a site, make annotated comments about what the site is, how you would use it, what you would use it for, and/or any other information that you may want to remember why you wanted to save the site.

Diigo also allows you to use tags to help organize your resources. Tags come in handy because you can really get carried away with saving sites and then when you have to go back and think about what site is it you know you saw the information on, you can click on the tag of interests to find all the sites within that category.

Diigo also has a bookmarklet tool. What a bookmarklet tool does is it provides you with just one-click to do many functions. For instance, when you find yourself on a site that is of interest to you and you want to save this site you just click on the Diigolet icon on your toolbar (you have to load the Diigolet icon onto your computers toolbar by following the directions provided by the Diigo website.) Once you have this loaded, you are able to use many of the tools provided.  Within the Diigolet, the bookmark tool allows you to save the sites URL by capturing the title of the website, your annotated information about the site, create tags or use the tags they provide, and also allows you to share you findings with other groups.

There is also the highlight tool that allows you to highlight information of importance to you on the site so that when you go back to the site you will notice only the information of importance to you or if you are sharing the site, the information that you want others to see, is highlighted.

The other tool that works well is the sticky-note tool. This works just like a post-it note. Click on this and a note page appears. You can type in a reminder, information, a question, or anything that you want to make a note about for the site and/or page.  

The read-later tool is great for those sites you may not want to save but want to read at a later time. The tool will save the site for you to access it later to read.

Where these tools can be used with any browsers, Diigo also provides other tools such as screenshot (allows you to save a visual of the site) and quick-note tools, that can only be used with specific browsers.

Sharing your Diigo bookmarks or creating a shared bookmark group, is a great tool to use in the classroom for your students or among your colleagues. For you students you can create a group that allows them to access certain sites on particular topics. And for your colleagues you can create a shared bookmark group that houses sites that are related to issues related to teaching, content area topics, and/or tools for teaching. Creating shared groups is easy to do. Using the highlight tool or the sticky-note tool can became a positive benefit for any shared group. These tools take away from the time it may take to read a site and also allows for collaboration on both levels. 

Make sure you create lists for all your bookmarks. List help you further organize your sites. Create different lists for your different areas of interest and/or for you classroom. Lists allow you to create a list on your topic of study and share it with your students. . On the main library page, go to the “My List” section. Click on edit and here is where you can title your lists, give a description of your list, as well as make your list public or private. Your list will show up on your left side toolbar within your library.

Think about using Diigo in your classroom. By creating groups and lists, you can organize your topics so that students can easily access the information they need. You can also create an group and have your students do the research on the topic and add the sites for other students to use.

Check out this video on how to incorporate Diigo in the classroom. 

Don't forget to visit the Community tab within Diigo. to find sites that others have bookmarked to share. I do not know how Diigo has this set up, but it seems to target bookmarks that are of interest to most of my bookmarks. Diigo mysterious!!

At first I did not like Diigo. I thought it was too simplistic and “wordy.” To me it just looked like a list of sites with words attached to them. And although all the sites of interest were in the same spot, I had a difficult time finding what I needed without reading all the titles or using the tabs and then reading all the titles. After playing around with all the settings I was able to organize even further with the use of the “My Lists” feature. Now, like when I saved my sites in my favorites, I was able to organize them into groups that I can easily access and find. And although this sounds like it was doing me a service, I still was not completely pleased with the site. I started looking at other sites because I am a visual person. What this means when using a social booking marking tool is that I don’t always remember the name of the site or the tab I could have put it under, but I can tell you some features that the pages of the site consisted of. I find things quicker on a visual level. It is like when that person comes up to you and starts talking to you as if you are great friends, you know the face but for the life of you, you can’t remember the name. Diigo must have heard my cries because they now have a screenshot feature. This allows you to bookmark the site by saving the screen you are looking at. You can capture the first page of the site or any other page within the site. The only downfall is that you have to be using  Google Chrome, Mozilla FireFox, or Apple Safari browsers. This is not a downfall if you already use them or are willing to use them, which I have done.

Here is my Diigo Library. I say it is a work in progress. Enjoy and feel free to save any sites into your Diigo account.

What social bookmarking tool do you use? Do you use Diigo? What do you think? What neat feature do you use with Diigo? What challenges have you encountered with Diigo? How do you use it in your classroom? Would you use it in your classroom?