Firstly, a bit of context. My students were A-Level ones, so reasonably
mature (16/17) and the group was small (about 9) so I was on hand to support in
a very intensive way that I suppose might not be available for younger, larger
classes. What follows are some general thoughts on what went well, what didn’t
go so well and things that you should absolutely do to make sure students use
diigo properly:
Always have a print out of the students’ username and password
ready. Mine forget theirs. A lot.
The first few times students are using diigo and its ‘sticky note’ feature,
always start the lesson by reminding them that if they used
this feature then they need to make sure that as soon as they start writing a
note the select the drop down menu for the ‘privacy’ feature (see below).
Students need to decide if the content they are writing is to be shared with the
rest of the group (and most of the time with mine, it was), so they need to find
the group you have assigned them to belong to and select that.
2Highlighting is fiddly
! In its
current state, a few students have managed to highlight whole parts of the
website, rather than just the line or two I requested them to do. I don’t think
this is deliberate: It’s the same when we get frustrated on word when the
highlighter goes crazy. Remind students that if they make this mistake, they can
right click on the highlight and an option should come up to erase it.
Keep the diigo homepage open. It sounds silly, but a lot of
mine forgot to and then sometimes had to go through a few steps to get back to.
Remind them to open a seperate browser or tab when using the Internet.
Making use of your group’s diigo homepage.My favourite tool
is still this. I love the ability to review the annotations we’ve all made on
one page, by clicking on the yellow box that I’ve highlighted round the
red square below. It makes for a good plenary or start to the next lesson –
challenging those sticky note annotations also increases their value and the
respect you pay to the feedback students leave, something that leads into our
next point.
Moderating those pesky post-it notes. There’s nothing to
stop students leaving inappropriate notes , publicly, but lets not forget that
as long as a teacher is constantly refreshing the group’s homepage, its very
easy to keep track of the sticky notes being left on the websites that have been
bookmarked. I had one instance of a student posting an inappropriate sticky
note, but because I immediately saw it and immediately asked the student to
remove it, it seemed to be of little interest to the other students. Perhaps a
more interesting notion to consider is the moderation of the conversation that
can begin when students begin to respond to each others’ sticky notes