You can’t swing a tweet these days without hitting a new social networking site. Most are not great but there are a select few that you should keep your eye on.

Diipo.com (no relation to Diigo as far as I can tell) is one of those social networking sites you should try out and perhaps monitor its development progress. Here’s why:

• It’s just for teachers and students
• It’s free
• Teachers can set up class sites where they can post announcements as well as assignments along with links and attachments for students in that particular class site.
• Students can be added to class rosters, upload files, post entries like a blog, contribute to other group projects, and more.
• Like Twitter, there’s even a Ning-like virtual teacher’s lounge where educators can interact. The biggest selling point here is that it’s easy to share documents (lesson plans, ideas, etc) a la Google Docs… something which is still not super simple on Twitter.
• It’s in beta testing now (just opened actually) so sign up here if you want to kick the tires on this new social network.

Basically, Diipo is a lot like Twitter in terms of functionality with the media-sharing capabilities of Facebook mashed up with classrooms that are similar to Ning. It’s quite a feat to make these things work together and it will be interesting to see where Diipo goes from here after the beta stage.

Hands-On With Diipo

Your main page, notice the Twitter-like @mentions and familiar stream. You can upload media using a Facebook-like status box though.

the Educator's Lounge which looks a lot like Ning. Easy to use!

A just-started class page where you can share notes, status updates, documents, pictures, etc.

What Is Diipo?

(source)

Education 2.0: Social networking for your class. Diipo connects you the teacher with your students by making it easy to communicate with your class. Diipo also connects you with other educators and your class with other classes. Featuring an easy-to-use and familiar user-interface similar to Facebook and Twitter, Diipo helps students stay connected and engaged.

Sign up and start using Diipo today!

Key features

	Classrooms: Dashboards and apps to keep your students up-to-date, get questions answered and collaborating on blogs and group projects. Collaborative workpages help keep track of students and what they are working on, making it easy to get questions answered and students to participate in blogging and other group projects.		Education Microblogging: Engage students to start a conversation, ask questions, and actively participate in class discussions.
	Direct Messaging: Start a private conversation with classmates and teachers.		Student Blogs: Easily create blogs for students to share their thoughts, practice writing and journaling. Students can also work together on pen-pal projects and even collaborate and communicate with students from another class.
	Student Projects: Online project notebooks for students working together to share the information they collect with each other.		Files, Links and Images: Upload and share documents, links and other resources with classmates, project members or the entire class.
	Educator Community: Connect with other educators to share and exchange ideas and best practices on how to get the most out of Education 2.0 technologies. Educators can also share educational content with each other, brainstorm ideas for collaborative projects, pen-pal programs and more.		Profiles: Create personal and class profiles to become discoverable for other educators and classes to find you.
	Class Roster: Connecting teachers and students to make it easy to find and communicate with one another.		Knowledge Base: Every conversation and post is archived and searchable so you and your students can easily find what you are looking for.
	Administrative Tools: Suite of easy to use admin features helps keep your class running smoothly.		Topics: Tag messages, content and workpages in your class to easily organize and find content.