Digging in to Diigo: Research and Annotation on the Go (3)
The Media and Galileo: Learning the Ropes of Diigo (III)
The original intent of the project was to introduce two Web 2.0 tools, Diigo and Evernote. Diigo was meant to show students a little about researching, including how to bookmark and tag, and how to highlight and annotate information found online. Evernote was going to be an online note-taking platform. However in the process of introducing Diigo to students I learned one important lesson: school districts do not like students installing software or even toolbars on their computers. As such the feasibility of Evernote disappeared quite quickly so I ended up employing Google Docs instead, which seemed to work well except for a few quirks and kinks (which have nothing to do with this project and so I shall leave it at that).
With that said, I return to focus on the tool that I did teach to students, Diigo. I was not sure if students had seen this before, but after a few minutes trying to get students signed up I realized this was a completely new tool for them. The first time they used Diigo was during week one of my unit on public policy, specifically on media and public policy. I had planned to use Diigo again at the end of week two, when I was focused on public policy at both a local and international level. However, given my experience the first time around I opted to forgo using it that time. However, I did want to use it during my second unit, this time the unit was on the judiciary system. I had decided to use a mock trial as one of the major performance assessments for this unit, and as such I knew students should do some additional research. The below screencasts will explain in greater detail the lessons themselves, including SOLs, NCSS Themes, objectives, etc….
So as the above screencasts indicate, while my original plan and intent had been using Diigo to introduce some basic studying skills like highlighting and annotating, I ended up using it in a different way the second time around, as a research tool, and I think that is where I really hit my stride. There are a number of alternatives I might have used instead of Diigo, perhaps focusing on the bookmarking and tagging aspect, but I found those two ideas perhaps a little too conceptual for students. After all, I am still struggling with the proper ways to go about tagging things and ended up having to see some outside assistance for using Diigo in the classroom. But highlighting and annotating was something they could understand, since they were doing some of that already for Mr Longstreet. The concept of annotating was perhaps a little bit of a stretch for some of them, but not for all of them. Mr Longstreet was fond of using the term “paraphrase” to describe the student’s task to read and regurgitate information using their own language. I think I prefer the term summarize or annotate because it goes beyond that, but I digress.
Unorthodox History 
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