Diigo via Skype

Skype photo capture

This evening I was called to a Skype video call with my niece in order to help her configure a new laptop. Her well loved and well used netbook had died and with this death went her favourites.
I was able to convince her to download the Diigo toolbar and join Diigo in order to save her bookmarks where they would be available anywhere and anytime no matter what condition her personal computer was in.
After adding the Diigo toolbar to her Internet Explorer browser we used the bookmarking feature to save Twitter to her Diigo Library as well as a course site for school. She experimented with highlighting text, capturing images and pages and deleting unwanted results. 
We created a private unsearchable group to store her bookmarks and then she started a search for other groups she might like to join. The Music category attracted her and I suggested she browse for groups with larger numbers of members and recent activity. 
Her next step was to download and install Firefox and add Diigo to that browser as well. She seemed pleased with the results and expressed interest in my suggestion to use Diigo to coordinate group research assignments.
This took less than 50 minutes on Skype including time spent with family visiting, waiting for pages to load and downloading Diigo and Firefox.

Loving Web 2.0 tools

Does loving a Web 2.0 tool require research, reflection, and recall?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37996583811@N01/4919948842

Research: Brooks-Kirkland shared criteria used for "scoring" the OSLA Great Web 2.0 Face-Off at the 2011 OLA Superconference during a recent webinar I participated in. 
Identified as Types of Learning Boosts from Technology Peterson (2011) lists:

• motivation
• learning how to learn
• efficency
• creativity and content creator
• deep understanding of content knowledge
• assessing what we really value
• teaching strategies; techniques and organization

Reflection: What do I think about the selected tools?

• ease of access  (registration, login)
• learning curve
• tech support
• availability using school network
• intuitive interaction
• multiple applications: personal, professional, educational
• student engagement
• product

Recall: Think back-how did it go?

• Diigo (LOVE/LOVE)
• toolbar to capture, highlight, sticky note, bookmark, annotate, share and send
• group membership and creation
• tagging
• PLN! at your finger tips
• multiple applications professional, personal and educational

•  Blogger (LOVE) 
• simple to learn 
• gadget gallery and embeddable options
• tagging
• searchable
• no school access for student use

• Flickr (LIKE/LIKE)
• absolutely worth the time
• multiple teaching possibilities
• flickrcc - great source of digital images
• tagging

•  Thinglink (LIKE)
• simple to learn
• multiple applications

• PodOmatic (LIKE)
• simple to learn 
• recording and hosting
• tagging

• Masher (like)
• drag and drop timeline
• simple to learn
• limited length of video
• glitches in final frames, embedding

Doing the Web 2.0 Quickstep

As the first few months of my Web 2.0 course pass I have begun to dance the Web 2.0 dance just a little quicker. As a new dancer there have been the inevitable missteps.

Image: 'Indian dancer ¬ 9363*'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36699339@N00/3423542026

I have done the Flickr: steps at school without too much stress. I have experimented using Flickr in the library for a few lessons where I showed colour palettes and watercolour paintings. I found a visual of 5 grams of salt for a nutrition lesson and another group used the flickr images on Mashpedia to understand oil spills.

These Thinglink steps are still in rehearsal.  It is a tool I would like to have our students access on their web pages. It remains to be seen whether the thinglink plugin can be activated on Weebly student accounts.

The Podcasting steps are a bit more complicated than we thought but with more attention to the technical we will have this tool ready for performance. In order to accommodate class  podcasting we purchased an upgrade for the PodOmatic site for one year.  Some very enthusiastic grade 8 classes have created scripts to use for podcasting their research about issues related to water. Using Audacity which can be found on the school board computer image was simple although students found trying to transfer from Audacity versions downloaded at home to the school version was impossible due to incompatibly issues. We found microphones to use with our netbook labs and the library has purchased our own microphone/head sets. Unfortunately problems developed when the microphones would not record and when classroom noise levels interfered with recording.
In order to publish student podcasts we needed to contact  PodOmatic support. They instructed us to have students use the same login and password to access and publish their episodes on our podcast channel.
One more thing: we are looking into a school Voicethread Account and a staff learning session in the library to allow more students access to this tool for broadcasting on the internet .

Video Creating is a dance of frustrations. The students in small groups collected video clips for editing to create commercials for Media Studies. Students were given the choice of using Masher.com or Movie Maker. To access Movie Maker using school computers is simple as the software is on our school board computer image. Some of the library netbooks required downloading of the software which revealed that Microsoft Movie Maker is not available for Windows XP (the system our school computers use).
Our first attempt to upload to Movie Maker failed because our flipcamera files are MP4 and movie maker reads avi files.

'Flip Camera
http://www.flickr.com/photos/71018547@N00/2437471860

An email to our Learning Technologies Specialist gave me the link to Free Studio (supported by our board) to use to convert MP4 files to avi. The download and the conversion took forever! And because we were dealing with two classes and six groups in each class and needed to transfer from computer to computer using USB drives and the librarian didn't think to name the files using student names...you can imagine that day.

Thanks to the engagement of technology the students were patient while they waited and enthusiastic once their files were uploaded and the editing began.  Thank you to my colleague who was supportive and had a sense of humour.
I am seriously considering an additional investigation of Animoto for online video editing. Rouleau (2011) writes, "Animoto allows the user a fast and animated video creation tool that automatically adds in special effects with minimal effort." (para.3)

Still practicing these Diigo steps: Although I have had Diigolet added to my library netbook image and suggested to some students they open an account to collect bookmarks for a research assignment there has been little opportunity to teach with Diigo.

Blogging is the dance I most look forward to. Blogger is blocked by our board and Edublogs although recommended  by our board as a substitute for Google Blogger doesn't rank highly amoung staff who have class websites. Weebly though, is very well thought of and a number of staff already have accounts. A request to open a Weebly account put to our principal resulted in the purchase of a campus account for 750 students and 30 teachers with the ability for present account holders to migrate to the new school Pro Campus account.
We have introduced blogging to four classes this week using the Commoncraft videos: Blogs in Plain English., a Brainpop Video about Blogs and the Kist (2010) Snowball activity (p.37) which has been very successful in helping students recognize the need for guidelines when writing blogs.
I have recreated my BBAT boys' reading blog using Weebly and hope to encourage our boys to read and write using this tool. I am also considering using blogging for my Red Maple Reading Program group to discuss the ten fiction titles selected this year.

The dance continues and each day I feel a little more sure-footed about the opportunities for using Web 2.0 tools in my school library with the teachers and students.

Would you care to dance?

My 3 Social Bookmarking Hats

 My Teaching:
-research - grade 8 Body Systems
-private group creation (class/subject/teachers)
-collaboration and sharing of links
-in lieu of "can I email this to myself?"
-critical thinking re: creation of tags and selection of links
-writing annotations
-selection of text for highlighting
-bookmark appropriate sites for student pathfinders
-Student learning communities
-opportunities to connect to other researchers

My Learning:
-research for all graduate courses
-sharing links with colleagues and group members
-daily updates = instant PD!
-life long learning
-"cloud" access to all links
-extend my PLN to teacher librarians, teachers and others interested in Web 2.0 
-access far more on the internet through groups and those I follow
-subscribe to groups for updates, annotations and bookmarks


Personal:
-use a private Diigo group to save bookmarks presently residing in my favourites on each computer I use
-tagging is changing the way I work with Web 2.0
-connect with like-minded educators and teacher librarians
-expand my use of the internet to personal interests: storytelling and watercolour painting

Diigo Pros and Cons

Pros:

• free online access anywhere
• simple toolbar download
• bookmark, highlight, capture, annotate
• share by email, Twitter or add to a group
• immediate, daily or weekly feed of group bookmarks (my favourite feature)
• send annotations to a blog
• tagging
• bookmarks can be sorted by recent and popular and filtered by topic, bookmark or captured images

 

• collaborative collecting of internet information
• crowd sourced
• public or private 
• create a profile to encourage collaboration 
• groups may require you to request membership 
• notes can be added to shared pages
• tools include linkroll, RSS feed, embedded widget for blogs
• easy to use for student research 

I agree with @AuntyTech and the 50+ who completed the tool survey, Diigo is my top tool..

 
Cons:

• school board computer image "deep freeze" requires downloading of Diigo toolbar after every login

Delving Deeper into Diigo: Step Three

Updating my Diigo profile included adding a photo, my Diigo network groups and followers, a short bio and links to this blog, my YouTube channel and Twitter account as well as my top and recent tags. Access to this information through Diigo will hopefully encourage other Diigo users to follow me and increase the potential of my PLN.

I was able to search Diigo Groups using key word search terms and located groups reflecting my interests.  As a group member I am able to see statistics for these groups which indicate some have lost momentum and other groups have members who are regularly tagging and sharing. I will need to weed my list to remove groups with no activity.

I have become a member of the following groups:

Classroom 2.0
Comics for Learning
Cool Tools for Educators!
Discovery Educator Network
EdTechTalk
educators
elearning 2.0
Graphic Novels
LearningwithComputers
Let's Manga
Middle School English
Purposeful Learning Technologies
Social Bookmarking
teacher-librarians
Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0
Technology Integration in Education
Web 2.0 tools for teachers
Web2.0 at school

I have created a Diigo group which will provide sources of material for a column I will be writing for The Teaching Librarian. I am hoping to draw other teacher librarians as members and benefit from crowd-sourced material shared in my group. Berger (2010) suggests social bookmarking should be used in education because it "allows users to tap the 'collective intelligence' of the web,"(p.51) valuing more the sites tagged by more group members.

In order to access my Diigo in Education group on my home computer I added the RSS feed for this Diigo Group to my Google Reader. To encourage readers of my blog to tag, save and share my posts I added a Diigo widget to my blog.

One Diigo web service tool allows a user to automatically post Diigo links to a blog daily or weekly. Or users can post an enhanced linkroll which will feed recent bookmarks and annotations to a blog. It is HTML code and can be embedded to the blog layout or to a post.

My Diigo

Developing my Diigo: Step Two

• Leslie Holwerda's Groups | Diigo - Groups
  • 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Diigo toolbar is a wonderful thing.
By adding a toolbar to my browser I have the ability to bookmark any page on the internet without leaving the page and have it available to me no matter what computer I am using. I can highlight text and capture either a selected area of my screen or the whole page.

From The Book Whisperer, Making room for graphic novels
 


I am able to send the page link (see top of page) to a blog (Blogger, Wordpress, Livepress or four others platforms), Facebook, Twitter, email it to friends or easily share the URL of my highlighted, sticky noted page. Richardson (2009) states that " just getting in the habit of saving interesting and useful links can be a huge asset in itself." (p.96)

The toolbar allows me to quickly filter my Diigo bookmarks by tags I have selected.

I can identify my bookmarks with tags, and then share with any of my groups or send to Twitter.  I have begun to add tags to my bookmarks and to select groups for sharing.

My Diigo Tags

Diigo has changed the way I bookmark. I have NOT used browser favourites on any of my computers since beginning my Diigo exploration. Diigo provides access to every link from any computer. Diigo Rocks!

Digging Diigo : Step One

In Curriculum 21 (Jacobs, 2010), Jacobs discusses the need for multiple associations by professionals in education within a school (p.71) and Wilmarth contributes that "Digital social networks may be the biggest game changer in learning and what it means to be educated."(p.85)  Learning by both students and teachers will change extensively. Social bookmarking encourages multiple global associations and keeps us connected.  Diigo is a digital social network where learning occurs as "connections are being made within the tagging community membership."(Berger, p.45)

  Diigo= Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.

Although I have only put Diigo to limited use it has offered me an opportunity to access professional development through the groups I belong to. I joined Diigo with a free account in February 2011 and added the default Diigo toolbar to my browser. I have shared many of my finds with teachers at my school and teacher-librarian colleagues using the save and send feature. I have introduced Diigo to one grade 8 teacher who required his class to collect, annotate and share research for a Body Systems assignment.  I have used the capture feature to add content from web pages to this blog. But that is it!

Reviewing Diigo tutorials online gave me some insight into Diigo tools I had not investigated.

• follow other Diigo users
• add options to my Diigo toolbar
• follow more education, library and technology groups
• edit my profile -add a photo, my blog link, about me, why I use Diigo
• consciously tag each item
• highlight and capture as well as bookmark pages of interest
• bookmark, tag and share with my groups
• add the RSS feed for a group to my Google Reader
• add a Diigo widget to my blog

I have been anticipating digging more deeply and improving my understanding of Diigo uses and as a result opening "the door to new ways of organizing, classifying,and sharing Web content while also encouraging student and faculty collaboration and higher order thinking."(Berger, 2010, p.45)

Diigo: Fifth of 6 Web 2.0 tools

Diigo.com is an online social bookmarking tool for web image and document highlighting, book marking, annotating and sharing with a group.  As a learner in the Master of Education (TLDL) program focussing on the use of online sources I needed to go beyond adding bookmarks to my favourites in the browser. Earlier this year I began to use Diigo on the recommendation of my instructors and have subscribed to a few Diigo groups and receive emailed daily updates of pages bookmarked by other users. “By joining groups of like minded users, you are automatically able to access all of the bookmarks that other members of the group have chosen to save”.(Brisbane catholic education information and resourcing centre, 2011) The quality of these bookmarks makes Diigo a valuable addition to my personal learning network. At this time I bookmark and share sites through email using Diigo but have not used other features. I am intrigued by the use of tags and would like to become more active in collaborating with my groups. Reynolds ( 2010) predicts “We will watch as the cloud expands and frees users not only from the tether of their local hard drives, but also from other boundaries that have separated them from content and other users”. (para. 8)  Using Diigo to highlight and sticky note would help me manage online reading and research without the fear of lost access. I will demonstrate my use of tags, highlighting and sticky notes by including a Diigo page in my blog. I will include a list of my tags, my Diigo groups and some of the comments I have contributed and shared.