What's in a book . . . mark?

How goes the bookmark, spidey says to me?

Has it keep your place, keeping it safe in the vast web-like sea?

I have found a system, though it is just for me.

For students, I'll search 'till I like what I see.

I have been using Diigo for about a year now to keep track of things on the web. For my inquiry project, I really wanted to take a look at how I might use it in the library to keep track of good sites for students doing various research projects.

Will Richardson (2010) illustrates all kinds of uses for Diigo in the classroom: setting up accounts for the class, tagging them for individual students to follow, annotating comments for them (pp. 95-96). While I can see the merit in this kind of use of Diigo, I think the students at my elementary school are not quite ready for this yet.

My investigation into Diigo Educator left me disappointed. While I was successfully able to create a class and start making bookmarks, the "social" part of the application made me nervous. While many of the "education" formats for Web 2.0 platforms are closed, Diigo seems to allow students more liberty at veering off the site and into something else. While I am definitely pushing the edges of what parents and teachers at my school are comfortable with in terms of working and creating online, I do not think this would work.

Here is a link to the Diigo page for Elementary School Safety. It is a list of resources related to safely implementing EdTech in elementary schools. Quite ironically, students can easily click on the top of the page and get sidetracked into some links that might not be great.

In this Tip of the Day - Using Diigo, J. Bauer suggests some other uses of Diigo such as:

• Have a virtual discussions about a website or article by having every student include a sticky note with their thoughts.
  
• Make notations beside videos to let teachers or students know what sections to watch or to explain if something is unclear.

In this video, an elementary teacher-librarian is interviewed about how she uses Diigo with her students. The collaborative way that the students use Diigo is very impressive, and learning how to tag as well as annotate their bookmarks is a very useful research skill.

While these are some other good ways of using Diigo, I think I will wait to implement them until I am at a secondary school.

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin.

Where am I?

I am still on my web, but where are you?

The spider asks as I wander through.

You've tried so many things on your great big web,

When will you be done? the spider said.

I feel like I need to check in with my progress for this class, and see how I am doing and if I am still on track.

I have been very consumed with creating a video at the moment with students from the environment club at the school. We are putting the final touches on our entry for the BC Green Games. It is created in iMovie, which is not technically Web 2.0, so I am not sure if I should include it as part of my project here.

Anyways . . . where am I?

Facebook

I have set up my Facebook account and have added a bunch of friends. I find it is mostly just something else to check each day for news. I am not interested in most of the items my friends post, but do enjoy seeing the occasional fun photo, etc. I have posted some general questions to my friends and a few pictures of my kids. I have also commented on other's posts.

The most useful part of Facebook for me, so far, is the group that I belong to for the climbing gym where my son trains. I like that the group shows up on my home page and I can immediately see if there is anything new posted by the little number that shows up. This was very useful when there was snow and the gym was cancelled.

I can see how the "group" function would be useful as a school to have for parent communication (elementary) or even for students (secondary).

Twitter or more importantly, Tweetdeck

Part of my inquiry was finding a better way to manage Twitter. I believe I have found that with Tweetdeck.

Integral to my use of Tweetdeck is my installation of Google Chrome. At one point last year, I had actually installed Tweetdeck, but didn't like the fact that it sat on the desktop of my computer. With Chrome, the Tweetdeck plug-in allows it to sit in the web browser on the start-up page. I like this much better.

Tweetdeck has allowed me to organize the information I gather from Twitter. I have also loaded my Facebook account into Tweetdeck, so I can also see my Facebook news feed. I am not sure why the Facebook posts I see are not the same in Tweetdeck as in Facebook. I also can't see the "groups" from Facebook, which means I need to open up Facebook separately as well.

But, overall, I like Tweetdeck. I currently have the following columns:

• Facebook news feed
• Home - which is all the people I follow on Twitter
• #edtech
• #tlchat
• #pbl - for Project Based Learning, but seems to be some sort of foot fetish thing as well
• #frimm - French immersion
• @me - for tweets where I am mentioned
• inbox - for direct messages to me

I can easily skim through the columns and click on things that interest me for more information. I am not feeling as overwhelmed with Twitter now.

Social Bookmarking

I continue to use Diigo personally for keeping track and organizing links, but after exploring the education side of it and finding no filters to the outside world, I don't think I would use it with students.

I have just begun using Pinterest and find it very appealing because it is so visual. I believe this would also appeal to students, so will explore a bit further and see how I might use Pinterest with students.

Blogging

I have explored Kidblog, which I like, and Blogmeister, which I don't. I am excited to have enticed a teacher to begin blogging with her Grade 3/4 class. Next week, I will help her set up Kidblogs for her class.

Still to come:

• Voki
• Glogster
• Voicethread

Stay tuned . . .

Jumping into Diigo

Diigo again? For your students this time.

Spider tries to get it all in a line.

Wouldn't it be good to make lists of good things,

For the classes, in the library, would really have wings!

I have received confirmation of my Diigo Educator account and now need to figure out how to use it with a class.  I found this useful site on Student Learning with Diigo that has yielded plenty of good information.  However, I find the best way to learn these things is just jumping in and trying.

So, I jumped.  I created a class and added a couple of students to it.  This gave me usernames and passwords for the students.  I was able to do this without having email accounts, which is good when working at the elementary level.  I also added one bookmark to the group.

I then logged out of my own Diigo account and logged in as one of the students to see what they would see and how it would work for them.  Across the top of the page are tabs like this:

• In "My Library" the student would see any bookmarks he/she had made.  
• In "My Groups" would be the groups the student is a part of - in this case, "Les châteaux médiévaux."  
• "My Network" is a place where the student can follow other peoples bookmark lists.  There is a bunch of photos of people you can follow.  I must say that I am not comfortable having this available to elementary students - it is unclear who these individuals are and if they would be safe or appropriate for my students to follow.
• "Community" has "Hot Bookmarks from the Diigo Community."  Again, I am not sure that these  are necessary or appropriate for my students.

I am feeling disappointed right now.  I thought Diigo would be useful with the Grade 5/6 class, but I am worried about them clicking on some of these other people or sites connected through Diigo.

Not recognized????

What is the problem, what can it be?

My web is silk and always a comfort to me.

Mine is not always a comfort, I say.

It sometimes goes wrong, and it has for today!

So, I am a bit frustrated as I have been trying to apply for an Educator's Account from Diigo.  It doesn't want to accept my email - needs to be recognized as a school email, which it is, but from Canada - perhaps that is the problem.  I have emailed them to see what the problem is.  Why are things never simple?

Is a Diigo a dog?

My web is so vast, it is sometimes a chore

To keep up with all I've left piled at the door.

What do you do to keep track of your things?

To find them again when the final bell rings? 

I have been using the Diigo social bookmarking application since the fall to keep track of my numerous bookmarks gathered from my UBC classes, the many blogs, websites and Twitter feeds I follow.  I have used Diigo to create different "lists", for different courses or different projects I have been working on, and have "tagged" the sites so they are easier to find again.  I have also used the highlighting and annotating function in Diigo to, well, highlight and annotate things I want to remember on the pages.

I have been happy with using Diigo in this way, but really want to see how I can use Diigo at school to create lists of resources for students to use on research projects.  I envision creating lists but then allowing students to add to the lists as well.  Richardson (2010) describes how teachers can use Diigo groups with their students who can then access the collected links from home or school.  Groups of teachers can also use Diigo lists for collecting information and articles for ProD (Richardson, 2010).

As I went to explore Diigo farther, I noticed that they have a special Diigo Educator Account.

According to their website, Diigo Educator Accounts have the following features:

• You can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation)
• Students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and annotations, and group forums.
• Privacy settings of student accounts are pre-set so that only teachers and classmates can communicate with them.
• Ads presented to student account users are limited to education-related sponsors.

This looks very interesting, I am going to apply for an educators account and see what I can do with it.  

References:

Diigo, Inc. (2011). What are Diigo Educator Accounts?  Retrieved from http://www.diigo.com/education

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin.