The outstanding social bookmarking and annotating application, Diigo, has announced the release of Diigo Education. Designed in collaboration with educators from all grade levels, and with an eye toward the challenges of K-12 teachers gaining Diigo access in their classrooms, Diigo Education joins Edublogs and Voicethread with an education-specific side of an already robust and successful application. Diigo Education has the following features:

• Teacher accounts must be approved
• Personalized Teacher Console
• A teacher can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation)
• Students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and annotations, and group forums.
• To protect the privacy of students, student accounts have special settings which only allow their teachers and classmates to contact them and access their personal profile information.
• Ads presented to student account users are limited to education-related sponsors.

Educators, especially those in K-12 settings where Diigo is blocked by Internet filters, will benefit from this version. I strongly recommend you apply for a free Diigo Educator account and/or check out the FAQ and Getting Started tutorial.