Tagging with Diigo

I think Diigo could potentially be helpful in a library or classroom. One way I could see it being used is for group projects. It could be useful for students to share articles and leave comments for each other about certain parts of the text on sticky notes. Students could collaborate together without having to be at school in the same room talking to each other. The optional education account that teachers can set up could be useful for group projects. A teacher can set up an account where all students in the class are automatically set up as “friends” in the group so they can communicate easily with one another. Students can then use Diigo’s group bookmarks, annotations, and forums. Also, a teacher has a way of managing students’ accounts. For safety, the account settings can be set so that only other students in the class and the teacher can communicate with them. Additionally, only education-related sponsors can show advertisements in the education accounts.

Another way that I could use Diigo as a librarian is when I am teaching.

-In a presentation using the web, I could highlight important information as I share it with students, as well as leave comments on sticky notes about the information.

-If I were trying to help students locate information on certain topics, I could compile, organize and save links to different web pages and websites in locations according to topic for the students to view and utilize.

-I could promote conversations among students relating to the materials they are using, right within the materials. Perhaps I could leave comments on sticky notes in the materials I organize for students to encourage discussion about the topic.

-I could collaborate and share information with teachers and other librarians.

There are some potential problems with Diigo. Once something is highlighted, it stays that way, with no way to edit or remove highlighting. It is easy to make a mistake or change one’s mind about highlighting. Also, students have a tendency to highlight too much, and there is no way for me to go back and help them remove the highlighting from information that is not so important. Another problem that I have with Diigo is that when I close out of a document I have been working in and then go back into it, it looks like my highlighting and sticky notes have vanished. It takes a few minutes to load and show that they are really there. I wish they would load more quickly. I also found that Diigo is not as user friendly as some other technology. I had to rely on the help page several times as I tried to figure out how to use Diigo. With my limited experience using GoogleDocs, I feel that GoogleDocs might be easier to use for group projects than Diigo. However, GoogleDocs does not save images of a webpage, so if the site goes down I would lose access to the information; in Diigo I would still have the image of the page I need saved with all my markings. If I became proficient with Diigo, I would probably use it in my library.