Sorting through millions of pages on the web to curate resources can be a daunting task. Through the use of social bookmarking, resources can be tagged and saved to the cloud. Richardson (2010) refers to utilizing social bookmarking sites as a way to organize, annotate, tag, and share information. Some sites have the option to find individuals or groups with similar interests, and resources can be shared among them. Social bookmarking can be a very robust tool to use in education as teachers can curate and share great resources easily.
Diigo is a social bookmarking site and with a mouse click, you are able to tag, highlight text, annotate, capture a picture, add a sticky note, and bookmark to a list within My Library. In looking at Twitter resources, I decided to add them to my library in Diigo. To share those resources I can simply choose the tag for Twitter, a list populates, and the list can be shared. One feature that will help further my PLN, personal learning network, is that both group and individuals and their resources shared as public can be found through a search feature. I found several leading Instructional Technology experts and now follow them on Diigo as well as Twitter. Being able to search their libraries is like opening a treasure chest and finding a gold mine of instructional technology resources.
There are many ways Diigo can be used in the classroom. Private groups can be set up for classes and resources shared pertaining to specific projects. Teachers can share annotated links with either individuals or groups, and they can make comments. A threaded message feature allows conversations to evolve among teacher and classmates. Students can load the Diigo app onto their personal device and access resource lists from anywhere. Teachers have access to tools like widgets and word clouds that can be added to their blogs. I have added the Diigo Tagroll to my blog on the right. In coaching, I will use the Diigo app on my tablet and phone which will allow me to retrieve and share resources easily. Diigo will prove to be a very powerful tool and one I will utilize often in my coaching playbook.
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web
tools for classrooms. (3rd ed.). Thousand Oak, California: Corwin.
Image:
By RRZEicons (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
