Like explorers in a new land, it would be crazy to discover useful resources without sharing them. Each time we make available informative websites, thought-provoking articles or helpful videos to our peers, we are adding to a collective bank of materials that saves everyone time and energy. With multiple learners contributing to a collective bank of resources, we can have access to materials we normally would never have the time to find. So much effort has to go into homework, revision and major assessments, that we have little time for digital curation of resources on the web.
Twitter is a handy resource for conducting large group discussions. When you network with your group to meet at a certain date and time, everyone can tweet using the same hashtag (e.g. #ibhistory) to maintain the same thread of conversation. When you like what others have said you can retweet them. Or when you have a question or a remark to share with them, you can reply directly to their tweet. It's all visible to everyone following the hashtag, so everyone benefits from the open conversation.Â
Tweeting can go beyond simple conversation, and it can include everything from pictures to videos to links. You can shorten the link to anything, using bitly.com, and you can synchronize your various accounts like Instagram and Facebook to your Twitter account to draw more of your classmates into a thriving discussion. What's more it can be a fantastic review activity before a test or a analysis activity to digest a chapter in a book your class just read.
Find out more to using Twitter on the help page.
Diigo
Diigo is a social bookmarking site that allows you to save favorite websites as your browse, label them into particular categories, and annotate them (by highlighting, attaching comments, etc.) with ideas or key concepts. The social part of the site is that you can share these bookmarks with your peers, and you can all contribute to a group collection of websites and even add your own annotations to a friend's annotated website. Finally, Diigo also allows for an outline feature which gives you the opportunity to make a digital set of notes with embedded links to annotated websites you've collected.
The first step is adding the Diigo extension to your Chrome or Firefox browser. This lets you collect websites as you browse, quickly tagging them into a category and filing them with any of your peer groups. There is so much capacity to social bookmarking with Diigo that it's impossible to walk you through step-by-step, but the Diigo support site is very user-friendly. Also the videos below are tutorials for Diigo bookmarking and using the outliner, respectively.