Practiced with Twitter and Diigo today; learned about Google Docs

Today four of us (Karen, Shelley, Sue, and I) met after school for a couple of hours to help each other with course stuff and explore together. It was both very helpful and very enjoyable! They were interested in Twitter and I hadn't done much tweeting, yet, so we went there first. We reviewed how to follow someone, and set it up to follow each other. We also learned how to send private messages, how to block someone unknown who tries to follow you if you don't want them there, etc. Finally, we explored some of Dennis' tweets and used Diigo to bookmark one about a link that seemed especially useful.

With Diigo, Suzanne showed us how to use Google to find it on a computer where neither the Diigo Toolbar nor Digolet is installed. We highlighted the URL of a web page we liked, then pasted it into the box on the right-hand side of the Diigo My Library page to add a bookmark in Diigo to that page. I discovered that all of the text I had highlighted earlier in the Smartstorming article had, indeed, finally made it to my Diigo library page. I'm still confused as to why the highlights only sometimes show up when I revisit the actual article page, though.

Finally, I checked out Google Docs for the first time. It looks really useful! I'm constantly emailing myself things between home and school, but this might make that unnecessary. I still need to figure out where some of the formatting stuff is, such as a ruler to set tabs and indents with. I made a trial document and invited the others to help edit it, though, and Sue did -- that was neat! (Now I have to think about what sort of shared writing space you would use for what: Google docs, a wiki, or a blog; when would each one be most appropriate?)

I have yet to experiment with Google Reader or RSS feeds.