In preparation for a middle school technology class I’ll begin teaching in about month, I went ahead and set up a Diigo educator account specifically for use with my students. I will be using Diigo to teach both tagging and social bookmarking to 7th and 8th grade students. With the semantic web having arrived, the ability to categorize, sort, and search information based on meta data will be a critical skill students need to develop and there’s no better time than the present.
In order to obtain a free educator account you have to request approval for an educator account, but the process is pretty painless and quick. It appears at this time that you must work for a school in the United States, but I could be wrong about that. Once approved, you can go in and quickly add accounts for your students.
Several great features have been incorporated by Diigo that are winners in my opinion:
- You don’t need email addresses to create accounts for your students.
- Students accounts that you create are automatically added to a group for you. You have the ability to control the name of the group as well as the group’s URL address at Diigo. The ability to make the group private is also a handy feature when working with the young ones.
- Ad content is limited to educational sites only. That’s a nice compromise in my opinion. Diigo has a right to make money for providing their service and this is a way to serve the interests of everyone.
You can also get this nifty badge and put it on your website or blog ;^)
Nice, thanks Chris. I didn’t even realize Diigo had those tools available, and I use Diigo all the time. Your next task, should you choose to accept it, is–how do you pronounce Diigo?
I had heard rumblings about it, but didn’t have a good reason to use it until now. I think I should also set up a group for the teachers at school.
I believe it’s pronounced “Dee-Go”. Or at least that’s how I pronounce it ;^). Add me as a friend on Diigo http://www.diigo.com/profile/chrisbell.
I just looked that one up on the Web. Here is what I found:
Diigo is an acronym for Digest of Internet Information Groups and Other Stuff.
Diigo is pronounced “dee go”
Diigo was developed by Dr. Ren at UC Berkeley to help digest and organize and annotate the vast amounts of data on the web.
Awesome Jane! Thanks for helping clarify that. Do you happen to have a link to where you located that information?
That is awesome, Jane! I was just looking up how to pronounce diigo, thinking I didn’t want to sound behind-the-times or just plain ignorant in a job interview (!) and I found out diigo has educator accounts, too.
Chris, don’t worry about those twitter DMs… an awful lot of people stop using twitter after a few weeks/months! (I have two accounts I have pretty much abandoned at this point)