I know I said Feedly was my new best friend, but I guess I’m fickle because I think Diigo and I are on our way to being BFFs now. I have always been frustrated by the traditional internet favorites format. If I was looking for a particular bookmark, invariably it would be on another device. Or else it was bookmarked in a different browser on the same device. Or else I couldn’t find it in my giant list of favorites because there’s no way to tag them. I’ve also been the victim of bookmark-loss when a computer goes up with no warning and no chance to back up the list. (This has happened to me several times actually.) All of these things frustrate me so I think Diigo is going to be my solution. I really, really like that you can give your bookmark as many tags as you want. I really like that you can also add it to various lists. Searchable bookmarks really are awesome. And I love that I can look around at other libraries for similar material. I never thought of bookmarking as being a potentially social activity so that’s really cool. It looks like there are lots of groups I might be interested in following. I don’t want to over-join right off the bat and end up with information overload. So I think I’ll start out with the groups Discovery Educator Network and Diigo in Education and I’ll see how that goes. It’ll be really handy to be able to follow the groups in my Feedly.
While I was watching the video tutorials for Diigo, several ideas occurred to me for using this with my students and with other teachers. First of all, this will be great for sharing cool articles and websites with colleagues. I have several colleagues that I’m forever exchanging “Hey, look at this” emails with. The annotating capabilities in Diigo will be awesome for directing them right to what I want them to see instead of doing the usual “Scroll two thirds of the way down the page and look for a green tab and click that tab and blah blah blah”. It’ll be the same for sharing cool resources with my students. I could compile lists of great resources for them for various classes or assignments and leave notes/highlights on those resources for them. In the Diigo Educator Account FAQs, they suggest that teachers have two separate Diigo accounts–one for use with students and one for personal use. That’s a pretty good idea and I may end up doing that, but I’m going to think about it for now. In the meantime, I want to get back to playing with my new BFF. Here’s a link to my Diigo library, if you’re interested.
