Using Diigo Groups and RSS feeds in University Courses — Mark Morton

Diigo is a social bookmarking platform that allows a user — or group of users — to bookmark, tag, and share interesting web resources. For example, if a CTE staff members comes across a web resource pertaining to teaching or learning, he or she can add it to the CTE Diigo group, available here. Diigo also allows you to create an RSS feed of your resources, which you can then embed into any web page. You can see an example of this on the CTE home page: the scrolling items on the left side of that page are recent items that have been added to our Diigo group. In a university course, an instructor might make effective use of these technologies by doing the following:

  • Create a Diigo group for a course;
  • Add students as users to that Diigo group;
  • Encourage students to bookmark to that group any course-related web resources they come across;
  • Pull the RSS feed from that Diigo group into the home page of the course so that resources are automatically displayed as they are added.

One of the resulting benefits is that it helps to foster a sense of collegiality and collaboration among students.

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The Centre for Teaching Excellence welcomes contributions to its blog. If you are a faculty member, staff member, or student at the University of Waterloo (or beyond!) and would like contribute a posting about some aspect of teaching or learning, please contact Mark Morton or Trevor Holmes.

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Mark Morton

As Senior Instructional Developer, Mark Morton helps instructors implement new educational technologies such as clickers, wikis, concept mapping tools, question facilitation tools, screencasting, and more. Prior to joining the Centre for Teaching Excellence, Mark taught for twelve years in the English Department at the University of Winnipeg. He received his PhD in 1992 from the University of Toronto, and is the author of four books: Cupboard Love; The End; The Lover's Tongue; and Cooking with Shakespeare.

One thought on “Using Diigo Groups and RSS feeds in University Courses — Mark Morton”

  1. I do this in the web design courses I teach, especially because new information and resources come directly from blogs and online magazines in this field–not from academic publications.

    I can recommend subscribing to the Diigo Group feed via other tools you might be using to support the class, e.g. WordPress. In my case, I teach in Instructure Canvas, and that streamlines those Diigo Group bookmarks into the course announcements via that feed.

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