Diigo - Online Annotation Tool for Collaboration & Research

Why are students still researching information online, printing out the website that meets their needs, annotating and highlighting on the physical paper, and turning in that paper to a teacher?

#1 It's wasting paper
#2 It's time-inefficient
#3 It doesn't allow for peer or class collaboration

In comes Diigo... You may know it as an online social bookmarking tool, but with Diigo Educator Accounts, it can be so much more.

Here is a video tutorial I made for our district on setting up Diigo accounts and the basic features for use in the classroom.  Please note there are some comments specific to my district with regards to signups, as well as the fact that the students have to use the Diigolet bookmarklet instead of the Chrome "Capture and Annotate the Web" Diigo Extension, since the students currently cannot download it.


Here is the instruction document I created.

In my next post here, I will detail a mini-PBL unit one of my Tech Fellows just implemented that includes Diigo as well as Google Drive and Padlet to help both enhance and transform the learning experience for her students.


P.S. You can also annotate PDF files with Diigo and then save them to your Diigo Library.  There is a post here with the details.  I've only tried it a few times, but it looks like you can open up a PDF from the internet or upload a PDF to your Diigo library first and then annotate.  When you want to share your annotations, it's in the same place, but it's called "Get Share Link" instead of "Get Annotated Link".  It doesn't look like it saves the PDF to your Diigo library unless you click on the "Bookmark" icon on the toolbar that pops up.
*I'm still confused by this because I have an educator account and was able to annotate and save PDFs no problem.  However, when you look at their pricing plans, it looks like only two of the paid plans have PDF annotation.  I couldn't find anything concrete online.   So, if you don't have an educator account (yet), try annotating a PDF and let me know.  If it doesn't work, then try it again once your educator account is approved.