Diigo & Pinterest

Social bookmarking websites can be convenient places for educators to organize, explore and share web tools, activities, lesson plans, ideas and inspiration. Diigo and Pinterest are both platforms that offer the essential elements one would expect from a modern social bookmarking environment. That is, both allow the user to follow other users or specific tags and topics, message other users, and connect a variety of other social media accounts. While trying out Diigo and Pinterest, I’ve come across many situations where the functionality of the two sites overlap almost entirely, but there are some parts of the user experience and depth of tools that differed quite a bit for me.

Using Diigo has been pretty straightforward. The interface is clean and it is easy to navigate. Features of particular interest include tools that allow for in-depth descriptions, annotations, and outlines. It is also easy to edit many tags at once with the bulk editor, and to find related tags and groups. Diigo offers special Education Accounts with some features teachers may find useful for their classes, too.

Of course I have only been using it for a few days, so this may be a result of my own inexperience with the platform, but meaningful content has been harder to find on Pinterest. It feels like I have to click through a lot of seemingly unnecessary images and shallow infographics to get to any useful information. That said, I was able to find some great stuff through Pinterest. It just took me longer.

I am going to continue exploring both Diigo and Pinterest. I’ve already found some great sites through Diigo and, though the experience has been a bit clunky for me, I have found some useful ideas on Pinterest, as well.