Gathering and Organizing Info Online

This week I used two different sites to gather information, including ideas and supportive professional texts online: Pinterest and Diigo. 

I found that Pinterest is incredibly helpful for gathering small amounts of information, such as plans for in-classroom activities. This is because Pinterest utilizes an image as a link to further reading, which gives people the chance to gather much of the central information at first glance. Pinterest also has the ability to create various "Boards" where you can save these image links--like creating a virtual collage board!
 This site is bright, colorful, and easily comprehensible to new users due to its visual nature. I personally love Pinterest and have been using it for many years to organize my preexisting thoughts and ideas, as well as search for new ideas in areas that I am already interested in. The latter is especially easy to do because Pinterest offers suggestions for related pictures and articles, so a related idea is just a scroll away! Multiple users can also collaborate using Pinterest, as more than one person can be allowed to add Pins (picture links) to a Board.

Diigo is a site that allows you to bookmark other websites, organize them into various lists, and access them through any server. You can also highlight text in a website and save it for review on Diigo, as well as taking notes on the site. I think that this is a good tool for people who read and sift through huge amounts of information on a regular basis. For example, when doing research for a term paper, Diigo would be a helpful site to organize references and focus on the important parts of all that you read.
You can also work collaboratively on Diigo by forming a Group where saved websites with relating tags will be shared.

While both of these site can be effectively used to save and organize information found online for future uses, I think that they serve different purposes: Pinterest being for quick ideas and Diigo for research and further reading. Being that I am a visual learner, Pinterest is something that I will definitely continue to use. Diigo, however, is not as engaging to look at and--in its essence--requires a lot of reading to digest information. It is unlikely that I will use Diigo all that much in the future--simply because I don't revisit too many websites.