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Online Student Collaboration with Diigo

12/09/2013

Today’s students must be comfortable working collaboratively with peers.  Many content-creation sites allow for such cooperative efforts, but how can we encourage our students to collaboratively read and interpret materials they find on the web?  There’s a great web annotation and bookmarking tool called Diigo that can be used exactly for this purpose.

One of the Common Core standards calls for students to “Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse formats”. Paper organizers allow you to provide well-vetted, focused passages for students to analyze, focusing their examination of, for example, claims and supporting evidence or differing point of view. But as you move into the realm of the internet, it becomes much more challenging to direct their interactions and to solicit feedback. What’s a teacher supposed to do?

Bookmarking and annotations:

Diigo bookmarks in library
View and search saved bookmarks, highlighted text and notes in your Diigo library. (Click to enlarge)
Diigo can offer some very powerful tools to address this challenge.  At first appearance, Diigo is a very flexibly, dynamic bookmarking browser plug-in that easily lets you highlight text, add ‘sticky’ notes, copy images or capture screen shots of parts of a webpage. The annotations persist: when you revisit the webpage, voila – there they are, just as you left them.

There’s more: You can add a description of the page and attach tags of your choosing to help categorize and retrieve bookmarks later. The bookmarks, along with all the highlights, annotations and descriptions, are all visible in your ‘Diigo Library’. This library can be filtered, sorted and searched in a variety of ways making retrieval of even obscure pages extremely fast and easy. No more single-phrase bookmarks to confuse you.

Share pages, highlights, and/or annotations -- you choose.

Bookmarks can also be shared publicly, shared with followers, or shared with groups you join or create. Not only can you share the bookmark as a whole, but you can also set sharing options at the individual annotation level: some markings on a page can be shared to one group, some to another, while still others are kept entirely private.

This last feature, selective sharing to groups, provides a tremendously powerful tool for teachers. You can make a group for each of your classes. Once a bookmark is shared to the group, the entry will appear in all the members' libraries and they will be able to see any shared annotations upon visiting the webpage. (Also checkout Diigo’s plan explicitly for educators with many teacher-friendly features.)

Image: Students engaging in threaded discussion using Diigo
Students can engage in threaded discussion right on the webpage. (Click to enlarge)

Collaboratively analyze online content

And it gets better: Students can reply to group ‘sticky notes’ and engage in a threaded conversation, and add their own highlights and notes to support claims and arguments. The ensuing exchanges can be in response to prompts you’ve placed on the page, or be a discussion within a collaborative team of students researching a topic together.  And of course this can all be private within any given group or classroom.

Take a look at this site with lots of ideas on using Diigo in the classroom

Access your library and annotations from any device

Because the Diigo libraries is ‘in the cloud’, all libraries, bookmarks and annotations are available from any computer or device.  Students can work at school, then find, view and add to bookmarks and annotations from home. Students working on collaborative projects can share and comment on web resources from across the classroom or across oceans.

Diigo promises they are close to overcoming one very significant drawback: ability to annotate pdf’s is still in the Beta stage. Nonetheless, it is an amazingly powerful tool to engage your students in online collaboration.

Diigo - Quick Tour:



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