One day , a student came to me in dispair. I asked her why she was so blue. She  told me that a virus had got into her computer and the technitian had re-formated it. She took for granted he would not erase her favorite websites (Internet Explorer –Favourites), but unluckily he did! All the bookmarks she had collected during a year were “gone with the wind”. If you are a net surfer, you must understand her desperation.

Once I calmed her down, I decided to get advantage of the situation and show her and her classmates how to use an online bookmarker. That is how I presented Diigo (www.diigo.com) to my students. The name "Diigo" is an abbreviation for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff".

Despite the browser you are using (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome), Diigo is a social bookmarking service which has all the features you could imagine – bookmarking, searching, highlighting and more to organize all your Web pages. Some of the relevant features Diigo offers are:  

An optional downloadable toolbar: I showed my students how they can download Diigo toolbar which offers an intuitive user interface for beginners. If you download the toolbar (http://www.diigo.com/tools), Diigo will be at hand all the time in you computer. Downloading the toolbar takes a few seconds and it is optional. If you do not download it, you  can go to the website, log in and enter your dashboard.

Recommended Tags: I also reminded students the importance of using tags. They are a bit familiar with it due to our experience blogging. Diigo will automatically analyze the page content and recommend suitable tags for you.  Just point and click, and/or enter your own tag(s).

Highlighting: What for?  If you are a web surfer you must come across webpages you find interesting but do not have time to read at that moment, so you may bookmark  them to come back  later. But, you may forget what it was that you cared about on the page. With Diigo, you can highlight the the text why you’re bookmarking that website, and then later view the page with highlightsand. No more searching through the page is necessary to understand why you considered the website youhad bookmarked interesting.

Send Bookmarks to Facebook , Twitter or your blog with one click: One of the aims we have set at school is to make students work collaboratively and learning together, and I , as coordinator of the ICT area, consider sharing bookmarks is a way to achieve this aim. So, I showed students that with one click, they can send a Diigo bookmark to Facebook (the social network they are most familiar with). To send bookmarks to Facebook, you’ll have to install the Diigo Facebook application. http://www.diigo.com/tools/install_facebook

Functional Commenting and Possible Conversations:  I also showed my students that when they are reading a page, they can make comments right on it, that show up as speech bubbles. If another Diigo user comes across the page, he/she’ll be able to see the comment, and a real conversation can happen. These annotations can be kept private, shared with a group within Diigo or a special link forwarded to someone else.

We could not explore Diigo further in one class, but my students were very pleased with all this information and I am sure they will learn more about its advantages as they use it. I hope this article will be useful for you , reader, too.

This article is also available in

http://englishvirtualcommunity.blogspot.com

More info about diigo:

http://edudiigo.wikispaces.com/