Diigo Review

http://www.diigo.com/user/ekstickland

Diigo
is a free Web 2.0 social bookmarking application that promises to
provide powerful research tools and community collaboration. It
allows registered users to create bookmarks, highlight text, place
“sticky note” style annotations, tag websites by
category, and then share all this information with other users.
Additionally, because all this data is stored on Diigo’s server
one can access it from any internet-connected computer. There are
two ways of adding content to Diigo; the first is a simple
bookmarklet that can be used without installing software and which
provides basic functionality, and the other is a more full-featured
version which requires a download and install. Diigo would be quite
useful for educators seeking to give students a tool to use for
collaborative research projects, and fulfills NETS-T standard 3d
“model and facilitate effective use of current and emerging
digital tools to locate, analyze, evaluate, and use information
resources to support research and learning”. Overall,
Diigo provides numerous powerful methods of storing, sorting, and
sharing information with others and deserves a very high
rating in this area.

One
of the frequent consequences of creating powerful applications is
that they are often accompanied by a high level of complexity, and
Diigo is no exception. As previously mentioned, Diigo tools are
available in both a simplified and a more full-featured install.
However, while providing the essentials, the bookmarklet lacks many
of the functionality of the full install. When accessing saved
information directly via the Diigo website, users already familiar
with Facebook will notice several similarities to the layout of
Diigo, which might contribute to an easier learning curve for them.
Overall, while Diigo can be challenging to learn, this is due
only to the large number of options available and not because of poor
design. With a knowledgeable user to provide a sufficient tutorial,
any group of middle-school age or older students should be capable of
utilizing a large percentage of the application’s functions.
Overall, Diigo earns a moderate rating for ease of use.

There
are many ways that Diigo could be of use in a classroom; as a future
history teacher, I could imagine providing students with a link to an
online version of a primary source document and then asking students
to read the document and then leave annotations and highlights for
areas that were confusing, interesting, or worthy of comment.
Further, they could be asked to research and bookmark other related
pages that give information, pictures, or video that provide
additional information on the topic. For long term projects, school
administrators, parents, and other instructors could be included in
the group so they have access to track the progress of the project.
In this respect, Diigo is deserving of a very high rating for
usefulness.

Because
of the relative “density” of Diigo’s many features,
it is fortunate that it provides a fairly comprehensive set of
tutorials and how-to guides. Using these, a patient user can uncover
much of the features available. In addition to the material created
directly by Diigo, there are links from the help page to user-created
materials that provide further assistance. Finally, there is a user
forum where people can post questions that appear to be responded to
by a small but dedicated group of power users. Because of this
variety of helpful materials, Diigo earns a high rating for
online support and resources.

Overall,
Diigo is a powerful and useful tool for educators and power users.