Group items tagged

 Feature Highlight: Highlights Diigo saves the day with "highlights". Highlights let you select the important snippets on a page and store them in your library with the page's bookmark. Let's try it. Just open a page, maybe one of your old-school bookmarks or one of your new cat bookmarks, and find the information on that page you actually care about. Select that important text. Got it? Okay, now put your hemet on, 'cause this might blow your mind! Click the highlight icon on the Diigo toolbar. It's the one with the "T" on a page with a yellow highlighter. You will notice that the selected text gets a yellow background. This means that the text has been saved in your library, and as long as you have the Diigo add-on the text will be highlighted on the page! How's that for easy?   Now you've highlighted the text. It will appear in your library within the bookmark for the page it is on. Go to your library and you can see how it works. If you're not sure how to get to your library, just click the second icon on the toolbar (Diigo icon to the left of the search bar) and then select "My Library »".

Sticky Notes on the Web What? I can put a sticky note on a web page? How? Oh, that's right! Diigo. Just right-click anywhere on the page and choose to "add a floating sticky note". Type up your note and choose "Post", then move the note anywhere on the page. You have to type a note first, before you move it where you want, otherwise there's nothing to move!

Finally, a summary from a fifth grade group (their quotes, unedited by any adult): To Readers Read, Want to Read, and Help Others Read...  Get rid of levels- can't we just read books that we care about and matter?  Let us talk about the books we read in groups, with other readers. Not just in the groups that are at our level. Let us talk openly about why we do and do not like reading. When we can share what makes it hard, we have more of a chance to help one another. Stop making reading a competition. No more points. Readers at Barnes and Nobles don't go there on Saturday because they get 50 points. They go there to meet other readers. Don't judge people by what they can't read or do not like to read. Let us help others read. If we had time, we could learn about what we need, and then we could help one another be better. Let us do more reading and not more worksheets or tests on reading. We could then concentrate on the book, we might even try new books because we just want to read them. We do not want to try to read more books because we are going to have to take more tests then. Reading helps with our future jobs. It would be great to know what kind of reading doctors or scientist do, so if we wanted to do that job we could start practicing that early. If you want us to love reading, our teachers have to love it too. When they are exited about what they are reading and learning, we get excited to even if it is not a book we would have chosen. Give us comfortable chairs. We know that they more we read, the better we will get. That is really hard to do at a hard desk. Have you ever seen desks like that at Barnes and Noble? There is a reason for that!

To help students love reading, keep loving reading, and help others in the process they need:  Choice,  Authenticity,  Time, Access,   Be surrounded by other readers (maybe the most important of this list)

Currently I correct most of my student’s spelling and grammar when I approve their comments

I’d think it would be a different matter with older children.

If the blog is of academic nature and is going to be read by other students/parents/teachers, then it’s our job to show them why conventions like spelling and grammar matter.