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Diigo provides a great way to model and practice reading informational text and to engage students in collaborative virtual discussions.  Many know Delicious and Diigo as social bookmarking sites.  Diigo is so much more!  Find a website that you want your students to read.  Then use Diigo to model the active reading process and make notations right on the web site by using the Diigo tools of Sticky Notes and Highlighting.  Paste a sticky note at the beginning of the text to remind students to ask themselves, “What do you already know about this topic?”  Also, add a sticky note reminding students to note their purpose for reading.  Diigo’s highlighting tools include four different colors.  Use the various colors and model how to find the main ideas and highlight only the essential words in yellow.  Supporting details, key vocabulary words,  and confusing parts can each be highlighted with different colors.  Consistency in highlighting color will provide another cue for students about text structure.  Diigo serves as  an excellent tool for modeling the pre-reading process, for pointing out text features and structure, and to practice active reading by making connections and asking questions.  Once students are ready for independent practice, Diigo can be taken to another level.  Educator accounts allow teachers to create classes.  Each student  in the class can annotate  and highlight the assigned web site article independently.  Connections, questions, and comments  are then shared with the teacher and the class.  “Sticky note”  or “Read and Say Something” conversations can then be conducted through Diigo. 

"The feeling about homework is that it's really just busywork,"

professors didn't put much effort into teaching, so students don't put real effort into learning

"The current system places too great a burden on individual faculty who would, under the circumstances, appear to have perverse incentives: Pursuing these matters lowers course evaluations, takes their severely limited time away from research for promotion, and unfortunately personalizes the issue when it is not personal at all, but a violation against the university."

To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.

Mr. Taylor follows a very basic lesson plan often referred to by educators as “I do, we do, you do.” He does a problem on the board. Then the whole class does another one the same way. Then all the kids do a problem on their own.