How to Organize Information: Social Bookmarking with Diigo


How many times have you found yourself not being able to find a website you had previously visited? It happens to everyone. It has happened to me too. Really. The bits and bytes of information that we come across daily has grown exponentially from a stream to a river to a waterfall and we’re floating in it, trying not to get carried away by its force.
We simply can’t keep up with everything that’s out there. That’s something we have to live with. But for the things that we’re really interested in, personally or professionally, there are ways to save and organize so we can find them easily in 2 weeks, 2 months or 2 years.
Diigo is one of the free tools out there for this. It’s bookmarking, but bookmarks aren’t saved on your local computer disk, but somewhere else, on a server, where you can access them again, from a different computer or another portable device. They are stored in the cloud. Each time you save a public bookmark, you help others discover it too. That’s why this is called social bookmarking. Diigo has browser extensions so you can simply click once to bookmark a website. Always use tags to describe what you’re saving so you can retrieve it later. Diigo is also used for research (it supports highlighting and sticky notes) and group collaboration. Two very popular groups are Diigo in Education and Classroom 2.0. Finally, you can apply for a teacher account that gives you access to a teacher dashboard, where you can create accounts for your classes without individual students having to sign up by giving their email or other personal information. 



This post is part of the When EdTech Meets ELT series, my regular column for the TESOL Macedonia Thrace Northern Greece e-bulletin, and was originally published in January 2014.

Image credit:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/30668772@N02/3870214666/Author: Ellen Forsyth https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

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