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, 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 or their peers 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.

If you are an educator, you can go ahead and apply for a free Diigo Educator account now!

You can also check out FAQ and Getting Started tutorial for Diigo Educator Accounts.

Diigo Educator Accounts is only the first phase of our efforts to bring to education the powerful benefits of Diigo. Some early adopters of Diigo in education have these to say:

“Our diigo educators group has added so much to my professional learning as we can share bookmarks and use a standard set of tags for sharing.  I am very excited to now use this technology with my classroom in a protected space with my students, I appreciate Diigo’s willingness to invest in technology that makes teaching easier and gives us a personalized way to mark up and share our internet resources.”

Vicki A. Davis
Teacher & IT director,Westwood Schools
Top ranked Edublogger
Co-creator & awardees of numerous global Collaborative Projects
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“Diigo turns reading and research into a social activity.  Conversations emerge right on the page and spill over into the classroom.  Students love it.  They not only engage with the material, they engage with each other.”

Dr. Michael Wesch
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Kansas State University
Creator of the hit youtube video “The machine is us(ing) us”
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“I see all kinds of great educational applications for Diigo. One of the obstacles to using the Web for classroom research is the limited amount of time available for online classroom activities. And, since we specialize in technology use in the middle school grades, the slow reading pace of many of the students can also become an issue. Using the text highlighting combined with the sticky note feature, the students can be quickly guided to the most important information on a site, with a discussion starter or question posted on the sticky note. This is a groundbreaking tool in terms of the efficient use of the Web in a classroom setting… I did the demo this morning to 40 Mississippi teachers in a workshop, and it went off without a hitch. The teachers loved it. Next month some time, we would like to do a full-blown training session for our Technology Facilitators… Thanks for such a great product!”

Melanie M. Jenning
C·R·E·A·T·E for Mississippi
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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, give it a shot. And, as always, love to hear from you and let us know what you think!