Monday, June 7, 2010

Tool #5 Tagging & Social Bookmarking

Last summer when I did 23 Things, I learned about Delicious and I used it a lot this school year. I love Delicious because I can put any website there that I find that I think will be useful for any topic, tag it, and the site is ready for whenever the students need the information. Sometimes I come across a site while looking up something else. Instead of having to write it down somewhere and remember to use the site later, I can just put it on Delicious and it's there. I actually have two Delicious accounts... one for my history classes and a second one for Model UN and World Area Studies.

So for this tool I started to explore Diigo. Using Diigo, I found 101 sites It is pretty heavy on US history and government, but since there are 101 great sites, there are some that I can use in European and 20th Century history. For example, there are a couple of sites that access historical newspapers and a few other sites for locating e-books. Locating e-books could be useful for my 11th grade history students, because they have to write a 2,000 word research paper on a specific topic of their choice. They need a minimum of 7 or 8 sources. Besides the library, they could use e-books. Historical newspapers are useful for locating primary documents on topics we study.

Also, using Diigo, I found history History Exchange and joined it. It is a site where teachers share web sites they find particularly helpful. There were several about creating timelines on line. Others are about specific history topics, such as the Missile Silos of the 1960s (Cold War).

I found those sites using "explore Diigo groups". I put in "history" and clicked "search for a group."

I want to spend more time becoming more familiar with Diigo. I want to see how the annotating works. That seems to be the biggest difference between Delicious and Diigo. For example, I put an article on Delicious last spring for my students. It is about the Balkans, written at the end of the 19th century. It's a very interesting article. I'm going to put it on Diigo and try using the annotation feature.

1 comment:

  1. I love that you used delicious last year. It seemed to work so well for your students. I am not familiar with Diigo, but I will go take a look at it. You have some good ideas for using this technology in the classroom.

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