Group items tagged

Diigo is much more than a simple web annotation or social bookmarking tool. It is an online research and collaborative research tool that integrates tags, digital highlights, interactive sticky notes, captured snapshots, and group-based collaboration, allowing a whole new process of online information management, learning, and teaching in the 21st Century.

My Network is a new Diigo social features that adds to the product's strength. My Network creates a "content-centric social network," in which people are connected by what they clip, tag, and highlight. Users will be able to collaborate with other users based not on who is a friend to whom, but rather by who is interested in what. My network delivers web content specifically tailored to a user interests and shows users with similar interest. Participation in a larger network is made possible with its community features that connects users with people with common interests; thus, building global communities around topics and knowledge, tags, and sites.

Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other Stuff (Diigo) is a powerful free social bookmarking website with annotating capabilities.

Social bookmarking. When you save a Web site as a favorite or bookmark, it's added to a list that stays within that browser. Use another computer, and you don't have access to that bookmark. When you use a social-bookmarking service, you save your bookmarks on that server, making them available to you wherever you access the Web, and allowing you to share them with others. Ask your students to create accounts on a social-bookmarking service and to bookmark Web sites, news articles, and other resources relevant to the course you're teaching. Create a unique "tag" for your course and have your students use it, so that their bookmarks can be easily found. Ask students to apply multiple tags to the resources they bookmark, as a way to help them locate their bookmarks quickly and to prepare them for the kind of keyword searching they'll need to do when using library databases. If you're teaching a face-to-face or hybrid class, be sure to spend some class time having students share their latest finds, so they can see the connections between this work outside class and classroom discussions. Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.

Open digital faculty do more than just share and participate in open resources; they transfer their approaches to the teaching space. Learning becomes a shared activity in which the students also collaborate and participate in shaping the course activities. Student participation takes place in open environments where students might tweet what they learn, share insights on a group blog, create their own website of resources, or participate in a class wiki.

The difference is that today's sharing facilitators leverage technology to reach a much wider audience.

Although the natural inclination toward sharing cannot be altered, the moral responsibility to share can be influenced by the surrounding culture. The sense of obligation to share or not to share may be similar to the decision to be a vegetarian. For some, it is a lifestyle choice that may form slowly over a long period of time after many conversations with friends and colleagues. For others, the change can be sudden: a paradigm shift caused by participation in an unusual event. If an institution places value on faculty participation in open academic communities and social media activities (e.g., academic blogging), that culture can slowly influence faculty to be more open.

This technological revolution is different; it has the potential to fundamentally change the way we teach and the way students learn.

The sad reality is that most schools still believe that they are “teaching with technology” because they have a computer lab where they teach students important skills like word processing and how to create Power Point presentations.

we need to teach them how to find information and more importantly what to do with the information that they find

More and different types of learning and teaching are available in the digital environment. We must convince ourselves that we don’t yet understand digital education so we may open the doors more broadly to innovation and creativity

we shouldn’t set off on a cruise, and build the ship as we go

Few institutions pay much attention to re-creating these spaces online

Practice logs can promote these helpful activities. Such logs can show how often teachers use a new practice, how it worked, what problems occurred, and what help they needed (Sparks, 1998).

Professional development for technology use should demonstrate projects in specific curriculum areas and help teachers integrate technology into the content.

Specific content can help teachers analyze, synthesize, and structure ideas into projects that they can use in their classrooms (Center for Applied Special Technology, 1996).