Extending Your Brain…Even More
Yesterday I wrote about one of my favorite tools for getting stuff out of my head and into a trusted system to which I could turn when I need to remember or find something from the recent or distant past – Evernote. Today comes the other half of the technological brain extender I use almost everyday — Diigo. The best way to describe Diigo an online social bookmarking tool that lets you “annotate” the web.
I do a lot of presentations, workshops, not to mention weekly podcasts. And of course those require research and planning. Much of that research is done of the web. That is where Diigo comes in. As I find items of interest that I either want to share or perhaps add my own notes to, I use the Diigo browser extension to bookmark the content, store it in lists I’ve predefined, share it with predefined Diigo groups and finally annotate it with either highlighting or “post it” notes. When I am then ready to build or give a presentation I can simply look up the list of links I put together, return to those pages and see the notes I took or highlights I made.
I find Diigo to be very helpful in the delivery of the presentation, class or workshop as well. During the presentation I can bring up those resource pages and the students can see my highlights and notes as well. I can also make a list public so they can later go through all the links I put together and spend more time on them if they like. It has seriously reduced my need to print handouts. I just give them the link to the Diigo list I put together. Beautiful. They like it. I like it.
So with Evernote and Diigo I have two tools that act as additional, or even primary storage, for my brain. I’ve come to appreciate them more and more the older I get. I’m presenting a productivity workshop next Monday for the WELS Chicago Pastor’s Conference meeting in Carmel, IN, and you can bet these two tools will both help me prepare and also be tops on the list of recommended items they, and all called workers, should have in their digital tool belts.