Diigo: Growth Mindset stream in Canvas

In a previous post, I wrote about using Diigo to keep track of growth mindset content (I come across a lot of relevant articles in my daily reading!), and in this post I'll explain how to take the Diigo RSS feed and display it in Canvas. This is a perfect example of live content: as you browse online, you just bookmark articles in Diigo, write up some annotation to explain your interest in the article, grab an image if you want... and presto: that appears in Canvas too, automatically.

You can see the Canvas page here: Growth Mindset Playground Diigo. And remember, that's a completely open, public page — just click and go! Here's a screenshot:

Here's what you need to make this work:

1. Use Diigo to create bookmarks. It's easy to create a Diigo account (they have some special services for educators too), and there are some browser plugins that allow you to save bookmarks easily as you are browsing. Think about how you like to search and organize the articles as you choose your tags.

2. Optional: add annotations. I usually bookmark lots of stuff, and when I get time I then go back through the bookmarks and add notes (Diigo lets you edit bookmarks later to add notes). When I annotate an article, I add the tag "annotated." That allows me to easily find the bookmarks that are annotated, and I can also search for "NOT annotated" in order to see which articles don't have annotations (yet).

3. Optional: grab images. In addition to annotations that you add to a bookmark, Diigo lets you grab an image to save along with the URL. I just recently started saving images in Diigo this way (inspired by my use of Pinterest, which is totally image-driven), and I am really liking how the images provide good visual cues to help me remember the contents of the articles.

4. Put the Diigo RSS in Inoreader. You can then follow these instructions for Inoreader RSS in Canvas. Diigo is a really useful RSS service: there is an RSS feed for any Diigo search in my bookmarks, and the RSS link is at the bottom of each Diigo search page. So, for example, when I search for my Diigo bookmarks that are for growth mindset with annotations but not videos and not from my own blog, I get this page, with an RSS link at the bottom:
growthmindset annotated NOT videos NOT gmzone

So, just follow those instructions, using the Diigo RSS feed for step #2 in those instructions.

And have fun: Diigo is a really powerful tool, and you can build your own set of tags and feeds to keep track of important while also sharing it with your students!