Organizing your online life

    So, I'm one of those people that has a bookmarks bar (... is that even how you describe it?) on my Chrome browser that stretches off the screen. Recently, I patted myself on the back for creating folders on my bookmarks bar to condense all of my favorite blogs, sites and artsy stuff so that I could feel like I wasn't missing out on anything by not having it visible at all times. But, as you'll notice, it was still pretty overwhelming, because the bar was still so full!

Enter stage right: Diigo
    In our Ed Tech class last week, we were introduced to a number of websites that help you to "organize your online life" and invited to consider their potential and practicality in our own lives. I was assigned Diigo to explore, consider intently its uses and present my findings to a small group of fellow MACers. As I've explored Diigo in these last few days, I have been getting more and more excited about its simple, practical design and usability!
   Besides my overflowing bookmarks bar, I also have been trying to juggle Word documents and desktop sticky-notes to help me remember lists of my current favorite Youtube music videos, news articles that I haven't gotten to yet, interesting chemistry news for future teaching topics, etc. Diigo HELPS with this stuff! It is a bookmarking and highlighting tool that allows you to annotate webpages and save them in your Diigo library/cloud. Your Diigo account (and thus all those webpages you've been meaning to read and those Google searches you've repeated 10 times) can be accessed from anywhere.
    Diigo also is a powerful social network tool, because it allows you to share saved pages and annotations with particular groups. It also allows you to join communities of interest, such as "Common Core". Diigo gives you access to all the articles and webpages being tagged and loaded onto Diigo by other users. It seems as though this can be a powerful educational tool as well, since it allows you to setup on Educator account and grants particular access to your students to class files and folders...
    I am excited to clear off my desktop and shore up my bookmarks bar and begin to use Diigo as my drop-and-store bin that keeps things organized for me! In closing, my bookmarks bar likely won't change much, since these are the sites that I want to be able to access regularly and quickly, but at least I won't be tempted to add a new recipe or chemistry lesson webpage to my Chrome bookmarks!
    I look forward to utilizing this tool in my day-to-day life as a student and as a way to manage a wide range of interests, so that when I become a full-time teacher, I can use it as a tool for my students without the growing pains of learning a new technique on top of lesson planning!

Go to Diigo and check it out for yourself! It's free!

.... I didn't get paid for this endorsement, but maybe I should be...