Diary Note: One week into Social bookmarking with students

Last week, I explained that I had set up Diigo and EduClipper for our students (see post here).  Week One is over and they have had a taste and I am happy with the progress in this short time. I started with this short presentation. It was a starting point for discussion. On the day, I found that EduClipper does not play nicely with Internet Explorer, so we stuck with Diigo and I think that was a good thing, reducing the complication of two platforms. I will use EduClipper when I get Chrome installed at school.

I was interested, but not surprised to hear that only one student out of 52 was using any cloud based Bookmarking tool, and that was not a social one. I was pleased to hear the ‘Aaah’ moments when they realised the potential of the tool.Many described how they write URL’s on paper or in their books and were very quick to identify that this was not a wonderful method.  We discussed the importance of annotating and tagging and I left it with them. They had great questions, “Can we embed tags into our blogs?’ ‘Can I use my account when I leave Primary School?’.

diigo

We will see how it goes, but I have confidence that we will create a wonderful collection of student sourced resources. I can already see that they are showing signs of reading sites with an eye for curating – developing some critical thinking about the resources. I am happy with that but alwyas on the look out for ways to extend the idea.

Curation – Social Bookmarking with Students

It was serendipitous:

  • I had just written my last post on the value of using tags and cataloguing our resources
  • I attended TeachMeet Melbourne where John Pearce spoke about “Curation It’s Not Just Adults OnlySee his presentation here 
  • I was working with colleagues, planning an upcoming Inquiry Unit with a History focus for Year 5/6.

The planets were aligning.  I must take the opportunity to introduce these students to the value of curating – using Social Bookmarking tools to store, share and evaluate on-line resources.  So I browsed through John’s excellent list of Curation tools :

Capture

 

As I am dealing with students under 13, there appeared to be only a few choices (most have clear restrictions on use by children under 13).  I decided to experiment with Diigo for Educators and Educlipper as each allowed for teachers to create and manage accounts for students.  I was also looking for the ability for the students to comment on saved sites after reviewing them.

EduClipper was immediately appealing – the Pinterest for Education – a highly visual tool, Quite quickly I started clipping (using Tags of course) and then created a few Clipboards, including one with Australian History links.   I added my 52 students fairly easily (actually twice – oops).

I have been a long time user of Diigo for my own purposes and belong to a few groups, so setting up Diigo for Education was simple. Creating classes via a quick .csv upload was easy.

Capture

The class teachers can easily join in and collaboration is simple. I populated the collections with a few starter resources, with the intention of having the students extend them in the process of their research.  I hope to use the commenting section to embed some form of student evaulation.  Perhaps a few sentence starters that John recommended.  “I noticed……, This resource assisted me because …., I would recommend this for anyone looking for …….”   We will need to discuss the use of Tags to gain maximum benefit of any of these tools.

The next question is how to make students more aware of the  resources they choose and to be critical users.  The State Library of Victoria’s Ergo site has some useful information and tools for Research skills  and brilliant sources of material for teachers exposing students to primary and secondary resources.  I hope that after introducing the concept of Social Bookmarking, as we progress through to students personal inquiry opportunities, we can embed a pattern of sharing and discernment when it comes to the sources of their information.   Hopefully these tools will make this process visible and straightforward.

Since publishing this post I found a few resources that will assist:

Social Bookmarking with students on Edublogs

Using Social bookmarking with students – Langwitches

Part 1 and Part 2

Have you used these tools with primary age students ?  How do you teach your students to be critical users of on-line resources? 

 

 

Week 7 – Research tools (8/6 – 14/6)

Delicious or Diigo

I am along time user of Delicious and remain to be convinced about the benefits of Diigo over Delicious.  For the purposes of this exercise (VICpln)I have created a Diigo account and imported my bookmarks – it does not appear that my Network will flow over.  This makes sense as people do not always have accounts in both places.   This will be a big stumbling block for me as I have a great Delicious network, in fact it is one of my best sources of new sites and the people in my Delicious network are probably part of my PLN (hadn’t thought of that before).

I find social bookmarking invaluable, it saves so much time.  The key is TAGGING.  If you don’t tag with useful remarks, you may as well not bookmark!  Delicious also allows for Bundling tags, and I use that feature to combine tags for Inquiry units or into subject areas or age appropriate groups (Junior etc).  I live by the motto, the more tags, the better (as long as they are relevant of course).    The more specific you can be, the more useful they will be later when you are searching.  For example, don’t just use maths – be specific, use multiplication, year5, etc

In most cases, if I need sites for particular purposes, I will go to Delicious before Google as I know that I have already sorted out relevant sites.

Installing the applet to your browser is important in the process as it means that at a click (or two) you have a site bookmarked, catalogued and remembered forever – or certainly easy to find again.

So, can anyone tell me why I should change?  Why Diigo and not Delicious?   I cant imagine using both – one will be enough.

My Delicious tags – represented via Tagxedo below

tagxedo