Take a look inside 5 images
Diigo
Pros: Customization options and social features help students learn key Web skills such as curating and sharing online content.
Cons: Users need to be logged into Diigo and stay within one browser tab to use the system; advanced searches can turn up questionable content, and there isn’t much guidance on selecting sources.
Bottom Line: With a Diigo educator account, teachers and students have a safe space to organize, customize, and share Web content while learning about a variety of subjects.
The sharing aspect may be of particular interest to educators, who can use the site as a classroom tool by signing up for a Diigo educator account. Teachers can create student accounts and set up a Diigo group for classmates to access group bookmarks and forums. The functionality lets educators highlight key text and images, gather pages into thematic groups, and encourage online conversations about the materials. In addition, collaborative groups allow students to gather and annotate their own resources, strengthening their research skills. Teachers can use their educator account to create assignments that will boost students’ reading skills and encourage teamwork and collaborative discussions.
The educator-created accounts also offer additional safety measures. Pre-set privacy settings prevent anyone but teachers and students from using the group to communicate. The only ads are from education-related sponsors, and public search engines can’t access student profiles.
Diigo has evolved from a simple bookmarking tool into a collaborative destination (website or Chrome app) for collecting, commenting on, and sharing information online. Users add the Diigo bookmarklet (Diigolet) to the browser's bookmark bar and then use it to save pages to a personal library section on Diigo. When you find a webpage worth bookmarking, just click on the Diigolet button to add a sticky note to the page, highlight certain words in one of four colors, and save it to your Diigo library. Users can also designate the page as something to read later or share it with other users via Facebook, Twitter, or email. You can also search for content through Diigo using Google or by typing in a term and searching other users’ bookmark libraries.
Kids learn how to manage online content with Diigo's various features. They can search for, bookmark, organize, annotate, collaborate, and share resources they find online. They can also learn about numerous subjects by conducting searches with Google or other users' libraries. User groups exist for nearly 20 general categories, including business and finance, entertainment, music, hobbies, sports, religion, relationships, science, and travel. Moving from searches to groups to your library can be a little confusing, but overall, Diigo offers a great toolkit for developing key tech skills.
Diigo offers reading and communication skills practice to users who comment on and share bookmarked pages. It also gives teachers a way to share relevant, pre-screened website content, with notes to reinforce any lessons in the text. Group research assignments can help kids learn to collaborate and express multiple viewpoints when discussing which pages are the most applicable.
Learning Rating
Community Rating
Great collaborative note-taking tool!
I think it is a great tool to help students pick out main ideas and make notes on the things they highlight. The one thing that can be frustrating is that if one student highlights something another student can not highlight over top of what another student said. I think the document gets messy with all the highlighting that occurs. I overall really enjoy using this app.