Diigo

Diigo is a fantastic organizational and research tool.  The purpose of Diigo is social bookmarking.  Many teachers (in my experience particularly Foreign Language teachers) travel from room to room and/or building to building, and therefore work on any number of different computers during the course of a school day.  I hear frequent complaints from teachers who are frustrated by losing their bookmarks each time they log out of a computer.  Diigo eliminates that problem.

Diigo is cloud based, so it can be accessed from any internet-capable device at any time.  It allows for tagging as well as creation of lists, to facilitate organizing bookmarks.  Teachers can also create groups for their students (public or private), and manage student login information easily through the teacher console.

My French 1 students are assigned a French speaking country that they study throughout the school year. They revisit their research at different points based on the topic at hand.  For example, our current project involves researching street food common to their countries.  As members of the Diigo group I created, students create their individual libraries within the group to house their research, which they have tagged to help them organize their resources. 

But the power of Diigo doesn't stop there.  Using their toolbar called Diigolet, (students must save to favorites each time they log in, but it is a simple step) annotation tools become available for students to highlight and take notes directly on the website they are viewing.  When they access that site in the future, if they are logged in to Diigo, their annotations are visible, no matter what device they use to view the site.

 

I used to use portaportal to organize bookmarks that I wanted my students to access, in fact, I am still in the process of reorganizing the bookmarks I imported into Diigo from portaportal (it allows you to import all your bookmarks, but you lose the happy little folders that organized them)  I refer to Diigo as Portaportal on steroids.  A great resource!

 

What do you think?