The acronym Diigo stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.” No matter what the letters stand for, Diigo is a popular and powerful social bookmarking site that gives you access to websites you save from any browser and any computer. After registering for an account you can save and tag websites as well as add a description. You can organize your bookmarks even further with the lists feature and share them with your students or workshop participants via a slideshow. Additionally, Diigo allows you to highlight any part of a webpage as well as attach sticky notes with comments to your highlights or to a whole web page. You can keep your comments private or share them with your Diigo groups.
Diigo now has educator accounts with some very nice features for teachers and their students. Teachers can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation). Students in 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 comments. Privacy settings of student accounts are pre-set so that only teachers and classmates can communicate with them.
You can get started with Diigo here: http://www.diigo.com/index
You can view video tutorials about Diigo’s features here: http://help.diigo.com/Getting_Started/Videos_Tutorials
If you sign up for an account and you’d like to collaborate with me, please let me know. I have lots of websites bookmarked and ready to share! I’m “cummingsl” on Diigo.
Laura Cummings
May 13th, 2009
At the recent Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) Conference, I was fortunate to be able to attend the SIGTELE Pre-Conference Workshop, “Content, Creativity & Collaboration: Web 2.0 in the Classroom,” facilitated by Jim Wenzloff. Jim worked in a variety of educational capacities in Macomb County for over 40 years but recently switched careers and is now working as a consultant at November Learning (http://novemberlearning.com/).
Jim started the session with a brief presentation about some of his beliefs for teaching and learning. These include:
* Knowledge is more important than facts.
* Engaged/motivated students learn more.
* How to learn is more important that what you learn each day.
* Test Scores will improve if students are actively involved in learning.
* Students will do better work for an authentic audience.
Jim’s presentation made an excellent lead-in to the hands-on portion of the workshop! Below are highlights of what we learned.
Official Scribe for Class
To engage and motivate us while providing us with an authentic audience, Jim had the participants take turns being the scribe for the session in a shared Google document. He suggested that having students take turns creating the notes that will be posted to the class website is a powerful motivator. Click on the link to check out what students in an AP Calculus class are posting when they have their turn to be class scribe. A text document is not the only way to share important learnings. Jim also pointed us to Slideshare, blogs and wikis as places to post shared notes.
Design Team for Creating Online Tutorials
To help students deepen their knowledge of the concepts and skills they are learning in class, Jim suggested having the students make tutorials about the concepts. He shared several examples with us. One example was made by two elementary students using screencasting where they explained how to round decimal numbers. Another example was a video of two students explaining the Partial Products method of multiplication from Everyday Math.
There are a variety of free tools that can help make this happen. Screen-O-Matic is a website that allows you to create a video recording of your screen and upload it for free hosting all from your browser with no install. The Jing Project is a free download that lets you capture screenshots as well as make videos of what is happening on your screen.
Curriculum Review Team
Jim suggested that students take turns making podcasts that summarize events and lessons taking place in their classrooms. Click on this link to hear this type of podcast as made by students from “Room 208.”
If you are working in a Mac environment, your students can create podcasts with Garage Band. If you are working in a Windows environment, Audacity is a free download that will provide the tools you need to record and save files as mp3s. Gcast is a website that lets you record your podcast via a toll-free call from any phone and then hosts the podcast on their site.
Daily Researchers
Students work to find the answers for each other. The teacher isn’t the provider of all knowledge. Someone can be appointed the “Search Expert” for the day. Depending on the tools available in your classroom(s), the expert could search on the Internet, contact an outside expert via Skype or email, or look at the resources available from the iTunes store. Students could collaborate and share the information via Google Docs or Google Notebook, a Moodle course, blog or a wiki.
To see and learn about even more of Jim’s suggestion for using technology to leverage instruction and learning, visit his wiki, A New Adventure. All of the participants in his workshop are already taking steps into that “new adventure.” We will be looking for you to join us on the journey!
Laura Cummings, MACUL SIGTELE Director
April 2nd, 2008
