Diigo

This morning I went to a live webinar put on by Classroom 2.0 on the social bookmarking tool Diigo. This was the first Classroom 2.0 webinar that I have attended and it was great! They have one every Saturday at noon Eastern Time. You can view their calendar at http://live.classroom20.com/calendar.html . (Next week they will be talking about Skype).

Here are some of the highlights:

Diigo does some things that Delicious does not do. For example, you can annotate. What they mean by that is you can highlight and add stickynotes to sites you bookmark and share this with others. One of the presenters said she requires her students to do this when they bookmark a site. That's kind of cool because it helps get at those higher-order thinking skills of evaluating what's important, and summarizing important concepts.

Another big difference is in how you can share your bookmarks. In Delicious you can add people's Delicious bookmarks to your network. However, Diigo has a lot more options. For example you can have certain tags posted automatically to a blog in a tag cloud or as a list of links.

You can also create groups. If you are a teacher, once you have a Diigo account, you can upgrade to an Educator Account. You will then have access to a Teacher Console which will allow you to manage your groups. You can make groups private and enter students in without having to have an email address for them. Traditional groups have advertising, but educational groups do not.

Another cool thing about the groups, is you can have a group dictionary of suggested tags the group use. When you go to bookmark something, the tags automatically appear as buttons to choose from.

You can also "mirror" your bookmarks in both Delicious and Diigo.

This fits great into the PODetc course I'm teaching on Building Knowledge Networks. This week we are working on using social bookmarking to start to organize information around a topic we want to learn more about.

As some of you know who have taken online classes from me before, I like to do the assignments along with the course participants. I have decided I'm going to research how social networking is being used in education and organize my information in Diigo and mirror it in my Delicious account.

I'll let you know how it goes!

Reflections of Survey of Emerging Technologies

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, I am currently taking a PODetc course Survey of Emerging Technologies taught by Theresa Stanley.

The course has forced me to take some time to try some new emerging technologies that I have wanted to try for some time.

The first was subscribing to Google Reader. I have been a long time subscriber of Bloglines and use it as an aggregator for various ed tech blogs that I read. I have been meaning to try Google Reader for some time to compare the two. I am absolutely loving Google Reader. One of the really nice features is that you can embedd it into your iGoogle page. I decided to subscribe to some education sections of newspapers. It has been nice having it on my home base with all of my other widgets every day.

The second tool that was new to me was Delicious. I have been meaning to get an account for some time. It was so easy to set up. My favorite part is the social part. The fact that you can share book marks with your friends is really powerful. My Delicious Account is at located at http://delicious.com/tstephens12.

So far it has been a great class and I would highly recommend it to those of you who want to carve out some time to try new tools. Theresa's next class is starting March 2nd. You can visit our website for more information.