Diigo- Grade 4 Style
Diigo will be a new experience in my classroom. I had never heard of it before a week ago,
but I am excited to try it out and see how we can use it in our elementary classroom.
After reading/watching both teacher and student testimonials
this week, I feel motivated to share this tool with my students because it may
help them not only this year, but in future years too.
After a mini-lesson on what it is and how it works,
students will need an opportunity to explore Diigo to become comfortable with the new
tool, and to see how it might help them as a learner.
I can see how Diigo could be used across many subject areas,
and for many collaborative online projects, but for the purpose of this blog
entry I think I’ll use language arts because we are in the middle of a unit on
poetry. My 4th graders have a working knowledge of the different
forms of poetry as well as a variety of poetic devices.
I will share a link with the class to my favourite poem: “My
Mother Says I’m Sickening” by Jack Prelutsky. I will use the highlighter and sticky note features to point out the
poetic devices in my chosen poem. I will ask the students to comment on my poem
by making a connection to it. This will model my expectations for their first
collaborative task.
Next, students will have the opportunity to gather, organize
and store information as they search for links to their favorite poems online
and save them to their Diigo files. They
can explore the highlighting and sticky note features to draw attention to any
poetic devices they find.
They will have the opportunity to share information with
their classmates as they will share the poetry links they found online in
groups based on forms of poetry.
Students will have a chance to collaborate by exploring each
other’s links and commenting on the poetry shared.
I predict that the kids will love the highlighting and sticky
note features of Diigo. I think they
will find use in this tool, and want to apply it to their research and online
reading tasks too. And who knows? Maybe it will be a tool that they use for
years to come.
Image Citation: http://daytobeyou.com/inspire/lets-try-something-new/
What a fun way to make poetry come alive, Jenn! Please invite me when the poetry action begins. It would be awesome to have your kiddos follow up on VoiceThread by giving feedback to one another there.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I think our students will use this tool for years to come. As a high school teacher mentioned in her blog, this tool allows students to have their own account to capture their research and/or their resources so they always have access to the information.
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DeleteThanks, Moni!! We will surely invite you in to see our Diigo skills in action. :) Also, I think you're right about the Voicethread. I'll see how I can work it in too.
ReplyDeleteThis lesson looks interesting and I think both Diigo and Voice Thread will help your students to keep organized and have easy access to information. I also am looking forward to using both the stick note and highlighting features with my students in the upcoming weeks to see how it really helps their organizational skills!
ReplyDeleteI think the highlighting and sticky note features are going to really help us to all stay organized! Let's try it out in our rooms and then report back?
DeleteI think the students will love to use it and all the "tools" it provides!
ReplyDeleteGood idea about the poem! It will be a good beginning using Diigo!
Thanks, Raquel!
DeleteThanks for recognizing the importance of building skills like this at a younger age so that when they get passed up they have already had practice in using tools like this!
ReplyDelete