My Personal Learning
When I was in Graduate school, I did all my research using books and photocopying articles. I remember paying a $300 library fine one year and must have spent twice that on photocopying. Fast forward ten years and I still conduct my research by keeping printing copies of interesting web articles and putting them in a file folder. How 20th century is that ?! Even though I now do most of my research online, I only just realized that instead of printing out articles, technology has invented a system of keeping track of digital research. It's called social bookmarking.
I had not heard of social bookmarking before this course. I looked up the definition of Social Bookmarking in Wikipedia and learned that it is a free web application g people can bookmark interesting sites on the internet making your bookmarks portable and available to share with anybody who also has an account (as long as you choose to make your bookmarks private. It works great to collaboratively create resource lists. In addition, social bookmarking is a great tool for gathering, organizing, and annotating your research. It works like other web 2.0 applications in that you can look at other peoples' social bookmarking page and copy or comment on their research as well. I found a Youtube video that really simplified social bookmarking. The video references Delicious, but Diigo works the same way :
Benefits of social bookmarking:
Social bookmarking versus a search engine
Something I didn't know before is that social bookmarking can be a more powerful research tool than a search engine. According to Wikipedia, social bookmarking can be more accurate than using a search engine since in social bookmarking , " all tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource." When you type in a search term in Diigo, the results will only be sites that other people have bookmarked. This is a great way of filtering information instead of clicking on every single result suggested by Google.
Flexible access
As opposed to keeping bookmarks on your personal computer, social bookmarks can be accessed from anywhere you have an internet connection. I immediately thought that if teachers required students to keep their favourite web pages, images, and notes on a social bookmarking site, they could no longer use the excuse that they "left their notes at home" and therefore can't do any work during class.
My Professional Learning
I have been reading the Diigo Twitter feed for ideas on how to use Diigo as a professional learning tool. One great idea is to use Diigo to create a professional learning network. By creating a Diigo "Group", members can comment on articles by posting comments, highlighting relevant passages, or writing sticky notes. I know I have joined many teacher book clubs over the years and it was always difficult for everyone to make all the meetings. Perhaps it would be more convenient to have a Diigo book club where teachers could comment on articles and suggest websites.
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| I joined this group for my own professional learning |
Resource sharing
Diigo has many groups of teachers willing to share their bookmarks and their evaluation of certain websites. This is a great place to start gathering school-appropriate resources and teaching ideas. I will definitely mention this feature to the teachers at my school as well as to the student teachers !
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| An example of a Group to join and get resources |
Challenges
Although there is a lot of flexibility by collaborating online, I have found that it does not automatically entail less work than a face-to-face meeting. In my personal experience with online book clubs, not everyone was motivated to log on regularly and contribute. I found that about 1/2 the people were not very good at reading the blog / web site / forum that had been set up and instead waited until a "real" meeting to voice their contributions. It was very hard to have a team like this were only some people "met" online and we still had to catch up and listen to the non-online people.
Uses in School Libraries
Collaborative Research
I immediately thought how this tool would be a great benefit to me as a teacher librarian. Many times, I will help a class with electronic resources by making a web page of links to sites that I found. Diigo has a "webslides" feature that shows screen shots of the web sites instead of just plain links. This is great for visual learners or to motivate students to visit the sites I have selected. Another advantage of social bookmarking is that other teachers and the students can all post their favourite web pages to the same social bookmarking group. Once there, they can follow tags other people on Diigo have created and find even more resources.
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| My List for a Grade 8 Middle Ages project |
Digital Notetaking
Diigo allows students to engage actively with the content they find online For example, the Diigo toolbar allows students to highlight interesting content on webpages. When student revisits that page, the highlighting will remain. The "sticky note" features allows researchers to write notes on what sections they have highlighted. Finally by "tagging" a relevant webpage, students are easily reminded why they chose that particular site, hopefully using key words from their assignment.
Social bookmarking keeps track of the resources students used in a research project. This is very handy for creating a list of Works Cited since I can think of many instances where students forgot to write down which websites they used for their project.
Active e-reading
Diigo has a "sticky notes" feature that allows readers to annotate as they read a web page. Readers can use text boxes, arrows, or notes to mark parts of a webpage that is relevant to their research. Since all the annotations are saved, it would be great for students and teachers to look back on all the rough work the student has done.
Educator Accounts
Diigo allows teachers to sign up their class with accounts and pre-sets the privacy settings so that students can collaborate with each other without outsiders lurking in on the learning process.
Digital Literacy
If a teacher sets up a classroom "Group" of the students in the class, he/she can access the students' bookmarked and highlighted pages, and sticky notes. Teachers can comment on their students' pages and sticky notes, making these comments "private". This is a great way to monitor students' research and to check their engagement and comprehension of what they read. For example, it is not uncommon for students to leave their research till the last minute and then simply scan headlines and introductory paragraphs, avoiding reading what is written at the bottom of the page. Social bookmarking encourages time management and teaches the research process. Another thing to notice would be the point of view (bias) of the sites students are interested in, encouraging them to be critical consumers of ".com" sites as well as sites that are ".gov" , ".org" ,etc. Finally, reading students' sticky notes helps teachers gauge student reading comprehension. Are they getting the main points of the reading ? Are the sites they are bookmarking relevant to their assignment ?
Reading comprehension questions for French / Spanish / International Languages
I found a great idea on the Diigo Twitter feed for using Diigo to learn a foreign language. Herman Hall, a Spanish teacher suggested that when you bookmark a site on Diigo, you can write sticky note comprehension questions, for example, Spanish questions on a Spanish website. This is a great way to practice language skills and read culturally authentic content. Gracias !
Keeping track of learning
Diigo allows students to create a different "list" for every topic they are researching. If we encourage students to open Diigo accounts early, they can keep their lists throughout their school career. This works as a great research "portfolio" for them to keep track of their progress as researchers. It would be great for Grade 12's to be required to write or comment on their research and independent learning skills for their graduation exit interviews. Social bookmarking would allow students to store and share this journey from everyone ranging from their teachers to potential employers.
Collaborative Research Projects
Students working collaboratively on a research project can create an account on Diigo, create a group, and then be able to share the webpages, images, notes, and other media they have found with each other. For beginning researchers, teachers can bookmark relevant web sites and then send those links to their students, giving them a base from which to begin their research.
