Noting on Web Page

Noting is pretty useful in many areas of our lives. This skill works well when it's applied in real world, but when people want to note on web pages, they may have no idea which tool is capable. Well, this blog is about a tool which enable you to do that. If you like making highlights or noting on books, the tool called "Diigo" introduced in this blog may satisfy your needs on web pages.

Not only is Diigo a free tool, but also a free service, which can save whatever you have made with the tool to its server. Besides the feature of noting, it also provides additional services, such as Bookmark, Group, Searching bookmarks from others and so on. Whenever a user make noting on a pages, it would save the page as a bookmark. These bookmarks can be shared by other users, if you saved the bookmarks as PUBLIC pages. The other useful feature is called "GROUP". Everyone on Diigo can create their own groups on some specific area, then other users could sign up as a member of a group and share their pages with others on that area the group are classified as.

Diigo need to work with browser, you have to pick the one your browser is compatible with. It supports IE6.0/7.0, Firefox (The one I prefer) and Flock. After you installed it, a diigo toolbar would appear in your browser, and you need to register a user ID, then sign up to enjoy the advantages of Diigo. Once you set up this toolbar, browser enable you to make annotations or view one by others, and you can post a discussion on annotations by others as well.

In my opinion, this tool makes great effective efforts on helping people review page they visited. Before I was aware of this tool, I usually experienced having no enough time or energy to have a study on resources that I found interesting in first view. Experiences tell me If I didn't note that down, probably I wouldn't view it again, so the time and energy spent on that page last time were almost wasted.

Reviewing is also a important skill of learning English, which help me manage my time and energy in a module way, so that I don't feel any exhausting or bored, but more determined. Try to image that if you want to learn new vocabulary from a news page in English, you just read the page in order, and look up words on dictionary whenever you don't understand some meanings. In this way, when you finish reading the page, what can you learn from that page? Does that make you feel exhausted and you don't have any interests to read more? So this kind of studying method is not good for a long run, every time when you start reading a news page, you may be afraid of it, as previously doing that exhausted or bored you.

Here I illustrate how I study English with this tool in a easy way. With Diigo, I separate the process of studying English on one web page into 3 steps. Firstly, I browse my favourite foreign news website, mostly the VOA news (As it is banned in China, I use TOR to access the website), and find some stories that appeals to me. In this step, I just want to read some stories, not caring about the details of new vocabulary or grammar, noting down with Diigo the sentences in which there is a word I am not familiar with, or the sentences whose meaning I am uncertain about. After I finished reading the stories, turning to other stories if I like.

Secondly, next time I review the sentences of the stories I noted, and I could mostly make my efforts on understanding of the sentences. When I found new vocabulary or phrase, I post words or phrases attached to the sentence, which remind me what I need to focus on that sentence.

Lastly, I practice my oral skill by reading out the sentences I am already familiar with. In this step, I focus on correct pronunciation of each words. When I am uncertain about some words, I look up dictionary on PC, and correct it.


Websites:

Diigo Homepage
Tutorial on how to use Diigo