Social Bookmarks

Time after time I have had teachers tell me about great websites they have found but couldn’t remember the address.  “Oh, if only I were on my computer I could find it in my favorites,” is the common reaction.  I have been a big fan of del.icio.us for the last year, but Tom has been encouraging me to go Diigo  and I finally made the move. Diigo is fun, he’s right!  Diigo gives you the ability to put your favorites online (and much more!) so you have access from any computer. Diigo is a collection of information, knowledge and community available any time, any place, from any internet access device.  It’s especially good for people like me who can’t even remember phone numbers (except speed dial #3!)

                         

A creative website

The best way to understand the power for what Diigo can do for you is to watch this You Tube video.  (You may have to wait until you get home to view it.) Not only can you save your favorites, you can highlight, annotate, tag and share what you may be researching or reading with your colleagues.  You can even create your websites into an interactive slide show.  Add friends and colleagues to your Diigo account and truly collaborate on any scale.  There are also communities that you can join that share common interests.  For instance, the Discovery Educator Network has its own Diigo community and I just created on tonight for our Tuesdays group although I don’t quite know what to do with it yet.  If you have a Diigo account, would you add our group to your account and help us utilize it in a way that will encourage sharing?

An image to share

Google is always treating us to creative uses of technology.  Why not personalize your Google searching? Visit this tuesdays search engine, click change LogoText and write your own name!

A proverb

“ I am part of all that I have met.” Alfred Tennyson

An encouragement

Using accounts like Diigo and del.icio.us encourage socialization and collaboration. I get the biggest kick out of seeing what others enjoy reading, researching and sharing.  I do want to encourage you to make a separate account for personal sharing and professional sharing. Since others can join your network, their connections can lead to very interesting journeys.  Only add to your Diigo or del.cio.us account that which represent you. I do not recommend these sites for sharing with your students since links lead to unknown paths.  However, the potential to use accounts like these with tighter controls (selecting private) make researching and sharing for your students very engaging. The best site for classroom use that I have seen is iKeepBookmarks.com because there are more controls. How are you using online bookmarking?   Let us know by posting a comment on my blog.

How do you do that?

Now why would you want to put all your bookmarks on a website?  Wouldn’t that be a lot of work to go to each site and tag each one into Diigo or del.icio.us? If that were the case, there would be no advantage to having easily accessible websites. Did you know that you can export all your favorites in Internet Explorer and then upload them them directly into Diigo?  You can even export all your del.icio.us bookmarks and upload them to Diigo also.  Here’s all you do.  Open Internet Explorer. Go to the Add Favorites section and look for export.  Follow the screen prompts and within seconds it exports and html file of all your bookmarks.  Open Diigo. Click your log in name and a menu will drop with “tools” as one of the options.  In the tools menu, follow the upload directions.  Within 10 minutes I had every bookmark from my laptop and all my del.icio.us favorites uploaded to Diigo.  Very handy.

What are teachers saying?

 

Tales from the Teachers in the Trenches

“My students are making their own PowerPoints, using digital cameras, uploading the pictures from the cameras to the computer. We call our PowerPoints our mini-movies and they put a lot of effort into their writings so that they can make mini-movies.”  Amy Maslanka, Poinciana Elementary School, Kindergarten

As always, I am

Ubiquitously yours,

K