DIIGO and Pinterest: Two Tools for the Tech Savvy (or not) Teacher

This week in grad school I was asked to check out two websites: DIIGO and Pinterest.  Lucky for me, I am at least tech savvy enough to be pretty familiar with Pinterest (see last week’s post on being “behind the tree!), so I only had to check out DIIGO. Well, I am pretty impressed with both sites. So cheers to my first ever tech review!

Pinterest! What’s there not to love!? In addition to my Pinterest wedding, fashion, cooking, and inspiration boards, I have a couple of education boards for Spanish language learning, different unit ideas, technology in the classroom, and of course, classroom decorations! It is basically an online version of a filing cabinet where I store all the ideas I find to use later.  This website has been beyond helpful to me here in Costa Rica. About one year of my teaching experience here was done at a school with pretty limited resources.  Books in the classroom were dusty and underused, not to mention extremely outdated, and there was no Wi-Fi in the classrooms or access to projectors.  Just the good old fashioned white board.  Which is fine, but things can get pretty dull.  So having access to Pinterest in my house was like a lifesaver for me.  It let me search for creative ways to teach the topics I was working on with my kids, fun games, classroom management techniques, the whole nine yards.  It’s a great sharing site too because you can follow others if they are posting things right up your alley and you want to see more, or just save a specific post.  Once you start saving a lot of "pins," your Pinterest account will even recommend pins that you might like based off your interests. You can also message the people you follow. And, it’s full of pictures. You get a “vision board” of what you want your classroom or lesson to look like.

DIIGO, on the other hand, was something completely new to me.  For those of you who are also as in the dark as I was, DIIGO stands for Digest of Internet Information, Groups, and Other stuff. So after checking it out, I have to say I definitely recommend it. It's something called "Social Bookmarking." First and foremost, it lets you bookmark different websites and allows you to access these bookmarks anywhere.  I've already got a few for sites saved with some great resources for the Spanish classroom on my DIIGO. As long as you have access to the internet, you can check out any sites that you saved.  You’re no longer tied to one computer! I wish I had known of this YEARS ago. This is great for teachers who find a website they want to use on their home computer and look it up later at school.  It is also great for people like me who seem to frequently run into tech problems because, alas, with DIIGO I can see all those important sites I saved from anywhere.  It allows you to highlight text, make notes, and tag different keywords of the websites for easy search later.  I think the real icing on the cake is that it's social. You can follow others who are bookmarking and saving websites that might be interesting to you.  You also can get suggestions for related articles. I am still figuring out this social part, and I think once I start following teachers who are saving links for the Spanish classroom I will truly understand the benefits of social bookmarking.  For now, I am just so impressed that I can see my bookmarks anywhere, and can search through all of them by key words.

My final thoughts: For one, I feel so lucky to be living in a time where we as teachers have so many resources to help us be innovative in the classroom.  Both Pinterest and DIIGO are examples of social sharing sites that you can absolutely use as a teacher (and probably should!).  We can connect with and get ideas from people all over the world. As for me, these tools will both be in my repertoire for years to come! Unless... even better resources and websites are developed soon—which wouldn’t surprise me!