“So? How did it go?”

That’s the natural response to anyone who announces that they just planned and attempted a new experience. For me, that experience was using Diigo with my students. Diigo offers many cool tools for the internet age, and I was quite convinced, as I reported in the last class, that Diigo would be very useful in the classroom. But my praise was based mostly in just personal use of Diigo, as I had never used it in the classroom.

Now, I have. So of course, you are wondering: “How’d it go?”

Overall, I am quite pleased, and I definitely will be using Diigo again. True to my expectations, it gave the students an easy way to bookmark and annotate webpages that they found useful to their own study topics. In just one short day (with the help of our IT coordinator, who is also my wife) I had the students up and running with their education accounts, locating, bookmarking, summarizing, and annotating articles. Here are my reflections.

Pros

• Easy bookmarking
• Tagging bookmarks
• Highlighting web pages.
• Collected highlights in my bookmarks library
• Collected bookmarks and highlights in my inbox
• Annotating web pages by writing little sticky notes.

In my mind, one of the coolest aspects of Diigo is the fact that you can highlight text right on the web page. This makes it much easier to read a web page, and much easier to read for highlights if you return to the same page.

Another very cool tool is the way that Diigo keeps a user’s highliights and then collects them in my library of bookmarks. It’s like taking notes online! When I open my library, all of my highlights are listed underneath the bookmark for me to read and review at any time in the future.

Furthermore, when I share these highlights to any of my Diigo groups, the entire group sees my highlighted notes, providing them a quick encapsulation of the article (depending on how I highlight). See the image below for a demonstration. Join my Diigo professional education group if you wish to share highlights with me.

And of course, if I sign up for email notifications, I receive all bookmarks and highlights from the entire group directly in my inbox.

So does this work for students?

It does.

In a short period of time, my students learned how to log in to their education accounts, bookmark links, highlight text, and tag those bookmarks.

I required my students to highlight text for at least three of their articles, and conveniently, I received those highlights in my inbox. This gave me a quick survey of the links they found as well as the text they considered worth highlighting.

Because I created group tags, my students were able to look at other articles using the same tag as theirs, and in this way, they might find information that they had not found before. However, because the majority of my students were not sharing topics, there was not much use in sharing bookmarks this time around.

Regardless, with the skills for using Diigo under their belts, I am sure that there will be a lot of sharing going on the next time I assign a group research project.

Cons

I hate to even mention any cons, knowing full well how quickly many teachers reject new applications with even the slightest hint of difficulty. I myself often do that. But please DON’T! Diigo is very useful, despite a few cons.

Unfortunately, Diigo is somewhat cumbersome. Unlike most 2.0 tools, its creators have not spent a lot of time or money building a user-friendly interface, and so figuring out the various buttons and bookmarks does take some getting used to.

Also, the group function of Diigo relies on group members providing useful summaries, relevant tags, and just enough highlights to share a quick synopsis.

Of course, we had the usual technical difficulties with a few passwords lost, and some inconsistent highlighting features, but overall, the software functioned fairly smoothly, and my students were able to make good use of it.

On the whole, I strongly recommend Diigo for classroom bookmarking, as it allows teachers and students to quickly share relevant websites. In the internet age, this seems almost quid pro quo for any lesson that involves collaboration around internet resources.