Thinking About Learning

At last! With the release of Diigo 3 and the subsequent chatter in the Twitterverse, this great social bookmarking app is finally getting the attention it deserves!! Until recently I only had 2 close friends who were Diigo users. We included a social bookmarking page on our Digital Educators wiki to use in our Diigo evangelization efforts in our district. In spite of our best efforts, we’ve been unable to convert many other Technology Integration Specialists or teachers to our way of thinking about the advantages of Diigo. People just have a hard time moving out of their delicious comfort zones, but maybe some will be willing to jump on this bandwagon soon.

Here’s how I’m introducing Diigo at my K-5 school…I set up a school-wide Diigo account. Only teachers have the ability to add bookmarks (they’re still learning about tagging), but students can access the bookmarks. It’s a great way for teachers to collaborate and save sites for students to use for research, extending learning, and at-home study. Students use the highlighting tool when they are researching. When I taught them how to use the highlighting, we had a fabulous lesson about finding main ideas and determining important information.

Diigo 3 offers some useful new tools. A Diigo sidebar allows quick and easy access to your bookmarks, annotations, and other readers of your URLs. The bookmarking dialogue box offers a suggested tag and the option to share it with friends, groups or Twitter. The send button enables you to email your bookmark, blog it, or send it to Twitter or Facebook. I still need to play with the slideshow feature.

Diigo has added new meaning to the word “social” in “social bookmarking.” While I find this personally appealing, I am concerned about how this may impact my students. At this point they are novice users and stay within our own bookmarks, but they are digital self-taught learners. Soon they will figure out how to explore the larger Diigo world, which contains lots more than elementary-appropriate content. It would be great to have an education version of Diigo.

Ryan Bretag posted a great entry about Diigo on his Metanoia blog. He includes a great chart that compares the features of Diigo with Del.ic.ious and Zoterro, and includes the Diigo promo video as well. He makes a very strong case for the use of Diigo!

I finished analyzing the results of the technology survey that I posted for my teachers with Survey Monkey. Following the example of a TIS friend, I posted the survey results on a web page so I could easily share them with my staff. I was pleased that 48 people took the time to respond. It was a short survey with only 8 questions, but it gave me a barometer reading on the local attitudes toward technology. Honestly, there weren’t any surprises. Most teachers reported that the level of technology integration in their classrooms is not very high, but they have a very strong interest in learning more about how to use a SMARTboard. As part of our district’s technology roll-out plan, every teacher in our school received a laptop and projector last semester. Our SMARTboards have also arrived, but they are still sitting in boxes in a storage room. It may be months before the contracted company gets around to mounting them. (That is a huge frustration and another story.) My teachers are eager to get their boards and want to be prepared to use them. This eagerness is an open doorway for me, and I hope to use this momentum to help my teachers see that using technology is not just “one more thing to do.” Instead, it’s a way to teach students in ways that engage and motivate them. It will also make their jobs more fun, and it will prepare students to be successful in the world in which they live. The survey results encouraged me as a new TIS. My faculty has demonstrated good receptivity to me and my ideas. I’m excited about my work, and I look forward to good things happening in my school this semester!

Curriculum Connections:

Third Grade Social Studies: Research key battles of the Revolutionary War that were fought in South Carolina. Use Google Earth to plot the locations of the battles. Use Excel to create a graph of the casualty numbers for each battle. Write a “from the scene” news report of each battle and record them for podcasts. Resource: Diigo bookmarks of battle websites.

Literacy: Post Children’s Book Award nominee books on Shelfari to encourage students to read those books and post comments. It’s an online book discussion! Check out our bookshelf. We’re just getting started with this in our media center.