For the Organizing Your Online Life Project I researched the website Diigo.com. I had never even heard of this website and to be honest I was bummed I hadn't gotten Pinterest, I love Pinterest, and while as it turns out Diigo(I keep saying dingo in my head, I really have to stop that) is pretty nifty I don't think I could LOVE it quite like I love Pinterest.
With my Pinterest obsession aside, I had a little trouble with my research on Diigo because I wasn't currently wanting to research or save any articles. But after some trial and error and playing around on the site I discovered some cool things, like the sticky notes you can use to annotate websites or the capture tool that will save a screenshot of the article you are interested in just in case it gets taken down before you get to look at it again.
What I found SUPER awesome for teacher purposes is the groups that you can form on Diigo. I thought this would be really helpful for teacher to make groups with other teachers so that they could share interesting articles on education that they think others should see, or if they found a good website for lesson plan ideas.
A teacher could also use Diigo if they assigned students group projects, the students could have their own groups and share their research and annotations with each other. Along with this there is a community on Diigo that you can use to search for articles on any subject you want. I thought this might be useful because these are articles that people already thought were important enough to save, they might have some really good information for research.
While Diigo may not be my new favorite website, I am glad that I had to research a website that I don't already use, because I did learn a lot about how I can use this tool to organize my online searches.
This website sound pretty useful. The screen capture sounds pretty useful - it's such a pain when you've got the perfect article and, poof! it's gone!
ReplyDeleteI'm really impressed by everyone who already has pinterests and evernotes and stuff. Smoke signals had been working pretty well for me, but it looks like you've got a good thing going with that whole "technology" business. (:
Hey Lauren,
ReplyDeleteI also had Diigo as my website. I found it somewhat hard to navigate, and I don't think I'll be using it in my career. However, I will admit the online highlights and annotations are helpful! I just struggle with having all of these different tools and not being able to mush them into one application. I would love to be able to have the ability to do this highlighting and annotating through Google! Or maybe this is an option, and I just don't know about it? I do think the group aspect was nice, but I feel like we can do that through Google Docs, so it's hard for me to warrant using the group feature in my class! However, I too agree that I was glad to be assigned a website that I hadn't researched before, because it opened my eyes so some of the tools that exist that I'm unfamiliar with. If you use this site in your class, you will have to let me know how it goes!
Morgan
Hi, Lauren,
ReplyDeleteI think that most of what you talked about for Diigo seemed interesting, but what really turned me off to the idea of using it in my classroom is the fact that you need to pay for it to be able to use a lot of the features it has to offer. I posted this in someone else's blog, but the this was something I dislike about a lot of the online tools that we looked at. I looked at Dropbox, and without paying for it, you get 2 GB of space, which for use in a classroom will fill up quickly. I remember something we read in Shari's class by Noddings that talked about learning for one's sake, and maybe this is something the producers of these tools need to think about. Coming out with these tools for the sake of education. Sidenote: I know this is unrealistic because people gotta eat, but still, just pack the side of the screen with ads and make your money that way. Ok, time to get off the soapbox.