Online Student Collaboration with Diigo12/09/2013
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:
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.)
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