Maggie Tsai's Bookmarks tagged education →  View Popular

in this tool. I am in the process evaluating it for instructional and professional development purposes.

So far these are my thoughts:

1. I think I can easily mark up online student work with this tool.


2. I think online students can mark up each other’s online work with this tool. and discuss. One of the course activities is to use a rubric to evaluate an online course that the students will each be building as the main project for the course. The course review, I think, can be done using diigo. I think… not sure yet.


3. Online students can easily create annotated bibliographies of web resource in directed learning activities AND share and discuss them with others in the class.


4. This resource can grow and be available for the online course from term to term.


5. In addition, for webenhanced courses, this is an awesome, easy, slick, cool way to incorporate some very cool online enhancements to a f2f course that completely bypasses all the extra unnecessary flotsam you get with a full on CMS/LMS. you get a lot of functional features bang for the “buck” in this tool. It is a slick tool with a lot of functionality to suport interaction/collaboration, etc.


6. When i have my university administrator’s hat on i also see great potential as a tool to facilitate and enhance community and for professional development. I have an extended staff of 50-100 online instructional designers that i could use this tool with to aggregate links and info and resources and networking. We have over 3,000 online faculty that we could use this with to support them with info and resources and networking - differenciating between the needs of new online faculty and experienced online faculty… there is potential for discipline specific resources and info for online faculty… and it goes on.

Social Connection Tools

“Increased engagement = Opportunity for Increased Learning”

Engagement is the why for these tools

Information Literacy & Sharing Discoveries

• delicious


• Diigo


• Twitter

Annotations on sites helps information literacy.

Collaboration Tools

• Wikipedia


• Kaltura–collaborative video editing


• Google Docs


• Diigo

Create a sharing community

Important to teach students collaborative skills to prepare for work

Teams are goal-directed

Diigo

• Set up a group


• Have everyone in the group highlight and add sticky notes to discuss the content


• Diigo’s dashboard has forums for discussion


• Automatic notification available so instructors can keep track of discussion


• Help connect learning in class to learning outside

Before class on Tuesday, I have never heard of the program Diigo.  When Professor Wolf mentioned that, it was a way to annotate online documents right on the web page.  He also explained how it is interactive, that you can read other annotations posted by others and others can read yours.  At first, I didn’t see myself ever using this after this class.  I find it easier to read documents once they are printed out rather than right off the screen.  I cannot concentrate when the documents are on the screen and I feel better writing notes in the margins with a pen and highlighting.

After using Diigo on the readings for Thursday, I realized that I might be able to use this tool in a classroom with students.  I would not use it for anything lower than the fourth grade, but it would be a great tool to integrate into lessons.  For instance, a teacher could set up a group in Diigo and have the students all join an account. Then for different lessons, such as a science lesson on the layers of the earth, the teacher could use an article or web page that reinforces the lesson.  The students would then go in and read the article and comment using Diigo. 

I think students would benefit from this activity for several different reasons.  I think the fact that it is on the computer they would find it fun and different from reading out of a textbook and answer questions.  I also think that since it is interactive, the students can comment on one another’s thoughts taking the pressure off that comes with face-to-face conversation.  In addition, if this is done in the classroom using three or more computers, it is away for the children to interact but keep the noise level down while other students do independent work at their desks.

But, the real power lies in the ability for Diigo to become a community. Now you can save your bookmark to a group who share a common interest (some form of EduTech in my case). Now your bookmark and comment are that much more important. You can share comments on bookmarks with your group! I am sure that I’ll find more uses for it as the months roll by.

Join the Diigo Project Based Learning Group

Our school is modelling (and adapting the Napa Foundation ’style’) with teachers currenly heading to the US for in-school in-service.

I just had to start a Diigo Group. Please feel free to join and ask questions. We hope to share our experiences with other PBL schools. There are 4 ICT teachers at our school involved in PBL and a range of other KLA staffers - so if you’re thinking about PBL, then join the group.

Some of things it does includes:

• book marking but with annotations if one chooses, great for research on the Web


• writing an entry to your blog site


• writing a Twitter entry


• sending one’s bookmark to Delicious automatically


• sending snippets to one’s Facebook page


• sharing one’s bookmarks to one’s Friends or Groups eg. Horizon Project 2008


• installing small applications that interacts with FireFox’s tool bar


• can use one’s profile from other services such as FaceBook or Twitter


• one can standardise the Tags that are used


• dead easy to import bookmarks from Delicious

These are a few of its abilities and my sub-conscious will be processing all the experimentation that I have carried.