Using Diigo With Students

I've recently signed up with Diigo, a bookmarking site that is much more as it allows one to highlight parts of a webpage, attach public sticky notes to send comments back and forth, create lists to easily share, and even create groups where members can contribute bookmarks.

After reading this post over at Bright Ideas and reflecting on a conversation I had with a colleague today, here's some thoughts on using Diigo with students.

Ideas for Activities:

Create a booklist to share with your students when suggesting titles for reading fiction. Booklists could be tagged by genre also to be more specific.

Better yet use the group feature and have the students create a booklist of their most recommended books. The highlight feature could be used to highlight a favourite passage and the sticky note feature would allow students to comment on each others selections.

During a topic of study, students could add to a group list whenever there is a useful resource found. They could be asked to annotate the site to practice summarizing.

Students could be shown a list of websites that they could evaluate by using the sticky note feature to comment right on the site.

A "Toolbox" list could be compiled for repeating tasks throughout the year. Research tools, Writing poetry, Study skills, Math manipulatives are a few I think of right off the bat. This could be made available to parents too!

Educators Accounts are available for educators that allow students to be set up quickly with their own accounts and special privacy settings. This would be necessary to ensure student's bookmarks would only be shown to other classmembers. There is a suggestion that a teacher might set up two accounts one for personal and one for work.

Things to Consider:

I am still figuring out how the public and private options work in Diigo. When I imported all my bookmarks I made them all public in order to create lists to share with others. I figured all my bookmarks were mostly educational or of an "ordinary" nature. What I found interesting was when all my tags were listed together, one could actually find out quite a bit about my private life. For example, it would be easy to figure out where I lived from the tags with place names in them, and it would be obvious that I had two children and I even had their names as tags (which I quickly changed). I randomly selected another profile of a user who had shared a list. It had a number of specific legal tags that led one to assume this person was having legal difficulties. Awkward!

I see that there are different ways to both share tags, lists, comments and ways to make them private. Part of the beauty of this website is collaborating with others to create groups and lists of bookmarks but is important to be aware of all the different options for doing so.