The following is a guest post from Kay Cantwell, an Education Officer of Digital Learning at Brisbane Catholic Education in Brisbane Area, Australia.
13 Reasons Teachers Should Use Diigo
Diigo stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.” It is a social bookmarking program that allows you to save your ‘favorites’ online, so that they can be accessible from any computer with an internet connection. However, Diigo does much more than this.
So…here are 13 reasons every teacher should use Diigo:
- Diigo provides a free, efficient, effective and reliable way to save and organize your favorite websites, online articles, blog posts, images and other media found online.
How do I bookmark? Click here for a short video tutorial. The first thing you
need to do to begin bookmarking is either download the Diigo toolbar, or if
you don’t want a full toolbar, download the Diigolet.
- Diigo provides a lists feature that allows you to share carefully selected bookmarked websites with your students.
- Adding bookmarks to lists is easy. When you save the bookmark, you are able to allocate it to any list you have already created, or create a new list as you go.
- Diigo has tools that encourage students to collaborate with others to analyze, critique, and evaluate websites.
- Take advantage of the Teacher Console to manage student accounts – with no student email addresses needed. Create groups for your students to work within, and have them share and review resources as a part of their research.
- Diigo provides opportunities for students to apply higher level thinking skills while researching and gathering information.
- Diigo allows you to gain access to the ‘collective intelligence’ of the internet. By joining groups of like-minded users, you are automatically able to access all of the bookmarks that other members of the group have chosen to save. The many, many users of Diigo all saving to their accounts adds up to a lot of great websites identified, tagged and reviewed – much more than one single person could ever identify in a reasonable timeframe!
- Diigo allows you to develop your own professional learning network (PLN).
- Diigo provides a forum for teachers and students to discuss areas of shared interest, or a particular online website or resource using the ‘topics’ function within groups.
- Use Diigo to provide visual access to websites you have collected using the built-in program ‘webslides’.
- Use Diigo’s advanced tools to link its power to blogs and RSS. Lists of similar websites that you have created can easily be posted onto a blog by using the ‘post to blog’ button.
- Use Diigo tools to enhance professional reading and save time creating summaries of online posts.
- Access your information from any computer, or even your iPhone or iPad!
The free Diigo app can be downloaded from the iTunes store and you can be saving as you go. Enjoy the spare time you save through your increased organization of online resources and the power of Diigo!
Want to learn more? The following links may help…
Getting started with a Teacher Account
Introduction to Diigo
From TeleGatherer to TelePlanter with Diigo
About the Author
Kay Cantwell is an Education Officer of Digital Learning at Brisbane Catholic Education in Brisbane Area, Australia. You can connect with Kay via Twitter @Kayc28 or by visiting her online portfolio and web resources.
P.S. Want to have your blog post featured by SimpleK12 like Kay's? Click here to find out how you can be a SimpleK12 Guest Blogger too.
