As I work to put this Website together for the Spring 2015 term, I quickly realized how important Diigo has been to my career as an instructional technologist. With one link, I can share a wealth of resources with interested faculty members. As faculty members, you can also share resources with your students on topics that you curate. 

Diigo

Diigo is a very powerful Web-based social bookmarking tool. This means I access it through a Web browser or mobile application from wherever I am. It also means that the bookmarks I save can be viewed by others. The intent of a social bookmarking tool is to curate resources for personal and public use. Bookmarks are typically tagged based on one or more topics for easy reference.

• Educause – 7 things you should know about… Social Bookmarking
• Video about Diigo

On a regular day, I probably use Diigo at least 12-15 times. I am constantly looking for resources that will help me or others do our jobs better. Primarily, I look for new tools and ways to use tools in support of learning.

If I see a great Web resource, I save it to Diigo using a tool I have installed on my browser. I may find these great resources through a Twitter post, a recommendation from a friend, or through browsing. So far, I have collected 10,707 links and organized them with 300 different tags.

Compared to saving links as a favorite in a Web browser, I have the links available to me wherever I go. I also do not have to worry about losing important resources when my computer crashes.

In support of my work, I use the links I have collected in three primary ways.

Subject Guides

Because I tag each link I save, I have a ready-made subject guide I can share with others. For example, if you were interested in more information on Diigo, I would share these three links, which would take you to my subject guides:

• Diigo
• Diigo.Education
• Diigo.video

Newsletters

At the end of the month, I put together a newsletter called Geeks and Speaks. In this newsletter, I share many of the links I have discovered throughout the previous month that I believe educators would benefit from reading. Moving forward, I will be fleshing out the Jamestown Community College Technology-Enhanced Instruction Web site as well as supporting other newsletters.

Quick Ideas

I also use Diigo as a quick reference for a topic. It allows me to find locate a resource with confidence that I have previously read and liked the resource.

Social Bookmarking in Education

Here are some ideas for using social bookmarking in the classroom.

• Create a subject guide for your students. Provide them with one link in Blackboard and they will have access to your most up-to-date collection.
• Have students contribute to an agreed upon tag for collective class research.
• Show students how to collect and annotate resources for an assigned paper.
• Create a private group with your class to collect and share resources and commentary. Recommend an educator account
• Check out these Diigo-based activities.
• Tap into a stream of new resources by following tags or RSS feeds.
• Share resources with colleagues.

Interested in learning more about social bookmarking, I recommend you check out Social Bookmarking and Annotating.

I would love to hear how you are using Diigo or other social bookmarking sites.

Additional Reading

• Diigo – Social Bookmarking