Diigo - Social Bookmarking for the Classroom (Part I)

You have searched the world over for the very best web resources for your classroom. Now, how do you go about keeping up with the resources that you are planning to use again? Are you keeping a list in a spiral bound notebook? Are you adding the sites to your “Favorites”? I’d like to introduce you to my favorite online bookmarking tool, Diigo. There are many online bookmarking tools with varying degrees of interactivity. However, Diigo is my favorite because of the number of features that make it a wonderful tool for teachers to use in the classroom.

Let’s begin with a discussion of bookmarking in general. In traditional bookmarking, you use your browser to store a list of bookmarks or favorites (in Internet Explorer). Then you can easily go back into your list of favorites to access web sites that you wanted to keep up with. If you’re like most users, your Favorites folder is one long jumbled list of web sites. If you’re more organized, you may have created folders to organize your web sites into pertinent categories. These work for the most part, if you do all of your work on one computer. Raise your hand if you’re working now on the same computer that you use in your classroom. Nobody??? That’s just the problem… We need a solution so that we can access our bookmarks from any computer anywhere! Traditional bookmarks are saved only on the machine on which they were created.

Enter – online bookmarking. Online bookmarking allows you to save your bookmarks to a web site so that you can access them from any computer with internet access. That solves a big problem. You can now save your bookmarks that you’re finding in this course and easily access them from school when you go back in August! But let’s take it one step farther… Diigo (like several others out there) is not only online—it is also “social.” This means that you can easily share your bookmarks with others, search through the bookmark lists of other users, and have online discussions about the selected resources with others who are interested in similar topics as you!

All right folks, let's jump into Diigo. I'm going to give you a run-down of Diigo's features and how I see them being used in the classroom. I may miss something, however, because just this winter, they rolled out a new version with lots and lots of new features that I'm still learning. The site, http://www.diigo.com/introduce/home, has instructions on how to get started, but I can walk you through the process if you need help.

Bookmarking and accessing those bookmarks from any location: In Diigo, there are two ways to bookmark a site: 1 - the Diigo toolbar and 2 - the Diigolet. At your home computer and school computer, where you are likely to work a great deal, I would recommend installing the Diigo toolbar. It offers access to all of the site's features from one place. The Diigolet is simply a button that you drag into your Links bar in Internet Explorer. It allows you to Bookmark only - not access the rest of the features. I do this when I'm on a computer somewhere besides home or work. I drag that button up into the links bar, bookmark my page and then get rid of the button to leave the computer the way I found it. Either way works fine if all you're doing is bookmarking. In fact the developers suggest starting with the Diigolet if you're beginning and a bit intimidated by all of the features of Diigo.

When you bookmark the page, you have several options. You need to add “tags” or descriptors which you can use to find the site later when you have tons of bookmarks to wade through. You can give a bookmark as many tags as you want. If I bookmark something for our course, I might bookmark it with “MDE,” “searching,” “EfE,” and then specific descriptors for the site, like “metasearch,” “dogpile,” etc. Add anything that you think you might ever enter as your search term when you later look for this bookmark. You are essentially creating your own search engine of your own pre-selected web sites! I also use tags to help me to categorize my bookmarks for different courses that I teach or projects that I’m working on. For instance, if I know I’m going to need a site for my Biology class, I tag it as BIO1114. That way, I can easily send my students to a single link for all of those bookmarks (more on that later). Also while you’re bookmarking, you can set a bookmark to “public” or “private.” Public bookmarks can be seen by anyone, and private bookmarks can be seen only by you.

Privacy is something that we might want to address at this point as well. When I first started using Diigo and doing training on it, I thought I would maintain two separate Diigo usernames – one for my personal use, and one for training/courses that I teach. You may want to consider doing this. However, I found it to be too cumbersome to remember where I was bookmarking things, and bookmarks would end up in the wrong account time and time again. So I have gone to a single username. That said, the new features of sending people links provide an easy way to overcome this. If I put a bookmark under the wrong username, I could easily send it (or a large group of them) to the other account, fixing the problem. I may decide to go back to that model at some point, but for now, I’m an open book. Anything I have bookmarked, you will see when you visit my page. It’s kind of like letting the world see inside your kitchen junk drawer - yikes! So, if you decide to just maintain one username, be sure to use “private” for anything you wouldn’t want the world (your students or your boss) to see. For instance, if you’re job hunting, those sites might need to be marked private. If you’re researching a medical issue that you don’t want to discuss with your students, those sites might need to be marked private. Keep in mind that the Diigo toolbar keeps you logged in unless you manually log out. So if someone were to sit down at your computer and just open up your Diigo bookmarks, the computer would think it was you, and all of your bookmarks, public and private would be displayed. In the upcoming sections, (comments, highlights, sticky notes, etc.) – you can set all of those to public or private, and even to just display to a group (more on that later). If you’d like to take a look at my bookmarks or “friend” me, my username is melaniej.

Okay – next feature – Comments. When you save a page, you can type your comments about that page. These comments are seen within your Diigo page underneath the link. I use these in the classroom to provide instructions to my students about what they are to expect/do when they open the website.

On the page itself, you can Highlight sections of text. To do this, select the text by clicking and dragging across the section that you want, right-click and select Highlight Selection. The text will show up as a dotted underline (unless you have gone in and changed your display properties in the Diigo toolbar – then they will show up however you set them to show up). I use this feature to direct my students to the most important passages, especially when it is a site with a great deal of text to read. This also helps those readers who don’t have the speed and/or fluency to get the assignment done in time if they are expected to read the entire page.

Even more fun… Sticky Notes. Once you have a section highlighted, you can make in situ notes. This is wonderful if you’re doing a research project of your own. No more carrying around 3x5 index cards all over the library! Yay! But in the classroom, I use this to ask questions of my students. You can have the students answer the questions on paper to turn in to you, or you can have them reply to your sticky note with their answers/comments right there on the page.

Okay, I think that’s enough for a starter post on Diigo’s features. There’s so much more, but I don’t want to overwhelm you right at the beginning. This gets you bookmarking, organizing, and annotating websites. One last thing that I’ll show you is one way to share your annotated websites with your students. Once that’s done, this would be sufficient to use Diigo in your classroom. There are better ways to do some of those things, but I’ll save them for my next post. If you find yourself bogged down in just these instructions, stay here; don’t go on to the next post. However, if you’ve just whet your appetite with these, watch for my next post on groups (hallelujah!!!! We asked for these for a year before they were developed!), lists, messages, friends, and even a possible education version of Diigo in development. …and whatever else I find between now and my next post…

Okay, you’ve got your sites bookmarked and you want to share with your students. If you have ever done online activities with your students, depending on their ages, you might have found that it took FOREVER for everyone to get the address typed in correctly so you could actually get to the activity. And that’s just the first site. What if you wanted them to visit several sites and look at different information found on each? Diigo is your answer to that. First you need to have thought about how you want to use your sites when tagging them. You can always go back and add tags to sites, so if you’re behind on doing this, never fear. Say you have an online activity that you do with chapter 3 of your textbook. So you might have tagged all those sites with the tag “Ch3.” When you’re in your Diigo bookmark page, you can click on that tag in the right hand side of the page where your tags are listed. Your bookmark list will be filtered down to just those sites which are tagged with Ch3. AND you will notice that your URL in the address box has changed. In my biology class, the URL for my Diigo bookmarks tagged with BIO1114 is http://www.diigo.com/user/melaniej/BIO1114. I can send my students directly to this site where they can access all of my websites for their course. Now, what if I wanted to narrow it down even further? I might want to send my students to those sites which are tagged both BIO1114 and graphing. In my bookmark page, I can click on +graphing on the right-hand side of the page under Related Tags. Now, I have a list of those bookmarks that have to do with both BIO1114 and graphing. And the URL has changed to http://www.diigo.com/user/melaniej/bio1114+graphing. Now, that’s quite a long URL for a 3rd grader to get typed in correctly, so I’m going to avoid that by creating a shortcut on the desktop directly to this page. So, in Internet Explorer, I will click FILE > SEND > SHORTCUT TO DESKTOP. And when I go look on the desktop, lo and behold, there is an icon for “my bookmarks tagged….” You can even go in and rename the icon something easier, like Ch3 Activity. Now all your students have to do is click on that icon to get directly to your list of annotated sites for their online project.

HOW FUN IS THIS?!?!?