For the past several months, in consultation with dozens of educators, we have been researching ways to make Diigo more accessible to the education community, and to make Diigo a more integral part of collaborative learning in the school environment.
Today, there is a classroom2.0 workshop going on in PA. To make the new features accessible to the participants, we are happy to announce the release of
Diigo Educator Accounts, a suite of features that makes it incredibly easy for teachers to get their entire class of students started on collaborative research using Diigo’s powerful
web annotation and
social bookmarking technology.
Specifically, once approved for a Diigo Educator Account
* A teacher can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation)
* Students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and annotations, and group forums.
* To protect the privacy of students, student accounts have special settings which only allow their teachers and classmates to contact them and access their personal profile information.
* Ads presented to student account users are limited to education-related sponsors.
You can check out and apply for a free Diigo Educator account at
http://www.diigo.com/education
You can also check out
FAQ and
Getting Started tutorial for Diigo Educator Accounts.
Bob Wolf, of The Boston Consulting Group, and a researcher on the use of internet in public education recently commented: “We believe that Web2.0 technologies will define and be defined by the skill requirements of the 21st century workforce. It is time to understand whether models have emerged for using these tools that are superior to traditional classroom teaching alone and what are the best approaches for the practitioner to implement them.”
Among the web 2.0 technologies, we believe that Diigo provides a unique collaborative research and learning platform that will be valuable in all aspects of information processing, from discovering, digesting, organizing, sharing, collaborating to interacting, which are all essential skills for 21st centuary workforce.
With the release of the first phase of Diigo Educator Accounts, we look forward to collaborating with leading educators to explore the full potential of Diigo as an educational tool. Going forward, we will continue to work with our education community to define the next phase of Diigo for Education. If you’re an educator, we'd like to invite you to give it a shot. And, as always, love to hear from you and let us know what you think!
Maggie
co-founder
Diigo