Group items tagged

sophisticated examinations that better measure problem-solving and critical thinking.

Once charter schools have opened, it becomes politically difficult to close them, even in cases where they are bad or worse than their traditional counterparts.

Congress will need to broaden and sustain those reforms in the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.

I tried out Diigo educator and was REALLY impressed. This let me very quickly (and with no email addresses needed) set up accounts for 30 students. I then created a group for all 3 classes to use and added all the students to the group. In this case, since I only have one more day with the kids and am not sure if they'll be using Diigo after this, I just used the 30 accounts for multiple classes, but if this were for my actual students, I would have created an account for each student. Anyway, once all the students were added to the group, I just instructed them to make sure to share every bookmark for this project with the group. All of the students will then be able to view all of the bookmarks. Again, we couldn't install even the diigolet, but saving right from Diigo worked fine for our purposes. They used the same technique of tagging with last name, class hour, and other appropriate tags. I taught both of these methods in a 45 minute class period and the actual explanation of the bookmarking technique took only 7-10 min. of each class period. The kids (7th graders) picked up on it EXTREMELY fast.

for long term use and for individual projects I strongly recommend using Diigo educator, especially since I use Diigo so heavily in my personal and professional web research.

I highly recommend Diigo Educator to any teacher!

What I like is that Diggo not only lets you easily save items, it lets you highlight the "good parts" so that when you go back to the article you can easily find them. That turned out to be a real asset when I was working on my part of the JACC Norcal keynote a couple weeks ago.It's been a real pressure cooker of a semester, so I had very little time to put my JACC presentation together. However, I'd been bookmarking, highlighting and saving relevant blog posts and articles into my JACC list on Diigo (yes, you can categorize what you save) for weeks. So when I finally sat down to create a presentation, I had everything I needed at my fingertips. I was able to put it all together in a day. (By the way, you can view that presentation, Journalism in the Starbucks Era, on SlideShare, another great online tool.)But after downloading a Diigo update this morning, I realized I'm just scratching the surface of what you can do with Diigo. For example, my previous blog post on Greenspan's sudden epiphany...well, I posted it direct from Diigo while reading and bookmarking the article. Pretty cool, huh?When I ran through Diigo's "how-to" overview this morning, I found several other things I didn't know. In addition to using the one-click "Send to Blog" feature, you can also use Diigo's "send" feature to:send annotated and highlighted pages by emailpost to other websites such as twitter, facebook, delicious, etc.Cool! I'm using it for a tweet next.

But what really caught my attention was the idea of using Diigo as a hub for group research projects. You can set up a group Diigo account to share bookmarks, and make it public, private or semi-private. This has real potential for students working on group projects, especially since Diigo's "sticky note" feature also lets you add comments to the material you save, in addition to highlighting key passages.OK, I'm sold! I'm going to start demo-ing Diigo for my students.