Here is a snippet of the ideas being shared in online conversations by
incredible educators that you may be missing out on:
Bookmarking and organizing, lesson planning, share stuff with kids, online
discussions, share information among teachers—team, grade level, school or
district wide
Facilitating student collaboration for discovering information by doing the
following:
using the comment ability to analyze and evaluate websites
helping students to interact with text and helps them think about what they
are reading. Rather than just cutting and pasting, students are asked to
consider the text and the meaning of the text. Being selective and researching
skills are so important and will move the research agenda further foward.
Building an online community of telegatherers and teleplanters.
Customizing information using Diigo tools. Teachers with multiple sections
and/or preps can easily customize information, resources, activities using
Diigo’s groups, lists, and conversations. This can all even be done at the time
that a bookmark is made (for example, I could send the bookmark to a 7th grade
math group list, a pre-algebra group list, but not the 7th grade social studies
group)
Enhancing professional learning communities by sharing web resources by
using the cool highlighter feature or sticky notes and extend our chat about how
to help our students become better readers, then the PD would mean more to us.
Supporting Diigo-based fine-grained discussions connected to a specific part
of a webpage - which opens up the possibility for more meaningful exchanges
where teachers can embed all kinds of scaffolding into web-based materials with
Diigo:
sharing questions for discussion (either online, or to prepare students for
an in-class discussion);
highlighting critical features; asking students to define words, terms, or
concepts in their own words/language; providing definitions of difficult/new
terms (in various media, such as embedding an image in the sticky note);
providing models of interpreting materials.
using the highlighting/sticky note feature to “mark up” our “textbook”
(blog) with comments, observations and corrections to specific words, phrases or
paragraphs of each post.
Aggregating bookmarks the students make of websites valuable to their
learning, and use the highlighting feature and sticky notes as if they were like
the Track Changes feature in MS Word which lends itself more towards
collaboration and the iterative process.
Accomplishing peer reviews of assignments. Students place the assignment on
the web and other students critique it. This removes the need for specialised
peer review modules in some Learning Management Systems.
Facilitating instant conversation starters. Diigo allows for the focus to go
back to specific content. You bookmark a site and send it out to a Diigo group.
This resource becomes an instant conversation starter or at least a common piece
of content between members of a network. The diverse experiences of the network
can then discuss the resource and the unique perspectives of each of the members
can sprout new ideas into the collective. You get a lot of “I didn’t think of
things that way” or “That would never fly for me, because…”
Having students research a particular topic. The teacher(s) gather a few web
sites that students can use an tag them appropriately. In the comments section,
the teacher(s) might place instructions which are specific for the content to be
found on the web site. This enables students to read it before even opening the
page. This technique—which also includes highlighting content—is important for
younger students and helps focus them on specific content. Students can also
reply via virtual post-its to the highlighted text.
Marking up online student work with this tool. Online students can mark up
each other’s online work with this tool and engage in conversation about that
work.
Encouraging students to create annotated bibliographies of web resources in
directed learning activities AND share and discuss them with others in the
class. This resource can grow and be available for the online course from term
to term.