Social Bookmarking Plan

Social Bookmarking with Students

Introduction

This lesson is our first assignment within the journalism unit. In this lesson you will learn to use the social bookmarking site diigo.com to publicly and privately save bookmarks of websites you visit.

Purpose

Bookmarks are a way of keeping track of websites you may want to return to later. You may have used bookmarks in your web browser (like Safari or Chrome) at school or at home. You may use them on your phone or tablet. But when you use bookmarks in these ways, they are only saved to the device you are currently using. By saving bookmarks to diigo.com, you can create bookmarks which you can access from any browser, even one you have never used before!

Actions

Follow these steps to begin using diigo.com:

1. In a browser, go to diigo.com

2. Click on the “Get Diigo Now” button.

3. Create an account. 

4. Make a note of your username and password. Save it on your device.

5. Login to your diigo account.

Creating Groups

Saving bookmarks is great, but if you use diigo a lot, like I do, then you can soon have hundreds of bookmarks. This can quickly become an organizational nightmare. Do you really want to scroll through hundreds of bookmarks to find what you want? Of course not. So that is where Groups become very useful.

Groups are simply collections of bookmarks, a way of organizing bookmarks by project or category. You can create a group just for yourself, or you can create a group which you plan on sharing with others. This is social bookmarking, when you create a collection of bookmarks other people can use and benefit from.

Actions

Follow these steps to create a diigo group (you must be logged in to do this):

1. Find the My Groups link at the top of the page.

2. Click on the Create a Group button near to top of the page.

3. Type a Group Name. I would suggest “YourName Journalism”

4. Notice the URL fills in automatically, using your chosen group name.

5. Fill-in a quick description. Suggestion: “A group to track the news sites I use in my journalism project.”

6. Check the Education - K12 category.

7. Change the list to Private- so that only I and others in the class can use it.

8. Leave it Searchable.

9. Leave it Apply to join -moderator approval required. We will all request access from each other.

10. Select All group members for Who can invite new members. 

11. Enter the security code as two numbers, one from the picture, one as a big number in the text box below the numbers.

12. Click Create my group.

Joining Groups

You can create a group just for yourself and not share it with anyone. But for this assignment we are all sharing our groups with each other. 

Actions

1. In the diigo search box, type one of the names of your classmates’ groups. 

2. Click on the result.

3. Ask to Join that group.

4. Respond to your classmates request by allowing them to join your group.