The Next Prosumer Journey

My inquiry plan this week is to explore Diigo and Pageflakes.  Diigo may be the perfect web 2.0 tool to help me organize notes and references for my university course work. Berger and Trexler (2010) assert that Diigo is the best social bookmarking site for research. One of their “Ten Reasons to Use Social Bookmarking in Education” is the fact that it “provides opportunity for ‘sensemaking’ through tagging, annotating, critiquing, or adding descriptions, highlighting, and adding sticky notes” (Berger & Trexler, 2010, p. 51).  This tool will also help me to update and enhance the parent resource page on my class wiki as Richardson notes that Diigo makes it possible to “automatically excerpt relevant and interesting stories about education right to a parents’ page on the school Web site.” (2010, p. 97).   Richardson (2010) recommends combining Diigo with Pageflakes to create a webpage with RSS feeds for certain relevant tags.  His example of a page for current information about Darfur (Richardson, pagecast) is impressive, however Berger and Trexler’s (2010) instructions for planning a personal information space illustrates even more clearly how useful such a page could be. Here is a Youtube tutorial for using Pageflakes. These tools will help me not only to organize information for my university research, but to share information with parents and local professional learning communities.

References

Berger, P. & Trexler, S. (2010). Choosing web 2.0 tools for learning and teaching in a digital world. Santa Barbara, California: Libraries Unlimited.

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. 3^rd ed. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin.

Richardson, W. Weblogged’s pagecast [Pagecast]. Retrieved from http://www.pageflakes.com/weblogged

Photo Credit: Webtreats. (2009). Webtreats red and white pearl social bookmarking icons. Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/webtreatsetc/5813421058/in/photostream/