Week 2: Diigo

After reviewing this week's reading materials and the lecture, I have chosen to analyze the use of Diigo in an education setting.  One of our building goals for the 14-15 school year is to embed digital citizenship into our curriculum. Through this process, I will be working with our staff to build and present lessons on digital citizenship and I believe Diigo will be a great organization tool to help with this process. My plan is to create a Digital Citizenship Library (or modify my existing one) based on each of the elements of digital citizenship.  I will share this library with our staff.  The library will contain basic information, links to activities, and links to videos to help teach the content.  I plan to evaluate the effectiveness of this tool continually during the implementation process of the lessons through staff feedback.  As this will be the first year of this experience, I believe immediate teacher feedback will work best.  

In addition to using this tool with our staff, I believe teachers will see value in the tool and demonstrate use to students for a variety of projects and activities.  I think Diigo is very user friendly and it is not specific to one device or location, so students can use the tool regardless of what technology they are using as long as they have internet access. I believe this tool will work well for students to organize information when preparing for a research project, report, etc. 

The YouTube video below is a short video demonstrating the use of Diigo. 

I following link gives an overview of Diigo in the educational setting and its use as a social bookmarking tool. 

To create your own Diigo account, go to www.diigo.com. 

Week 1... Back at it!

I am back at it... blogging. I very much enjoyed the course prior to this where we were required to blog, but to be honest, when that course ended, so did my blogging. I think the biggest constraint is time... I am sure that is the same for most people. I really enjoy reading different blogs, especially those that generated from this degree program. The class that I am currently blogging for is Technology to Enhance Literacy. As stated in my previous post, I have had little training and educational opportunities that foster literacy development. With that being said, I am very excited to gain knowledge on literacy incorporated with my passion, technology.

One of my biggest take aways this week came from reading Literacy 2.0: Reading and Writing in 21^st Century Classrooms, the difference between literacy 1.0 and 2.0, “literacy 1.0 was about access to information, literacy 2.0 is about finding, using, producing, and sharing information” (2010). I think this is very easy to understand, but as educators, we sometimes forget all of the capabilities that literacy 2.0 has to offer. Literacy 2.0 is the piece that has the potential to fully engage our students.

My second take away from the reading was the section regarding what students need to enhance their educational experience. When surveying 280,000 students, the study found that students want technology integration. I truly believe that this is the hook for many of our students. The book said that as educators “we should focus on the functions of technology rather than the tools or forms of technology” (2010). This means that many of the tools will change and that students will always be one step ahead, but if we can embrace the different functions, we will develop engaged learners.

To get to know me more, please read my first post or leave your email address on my blog.

New Class

For the next several weeks, I will be blogging my journey through EDET 573, Technology to Enhance Literacy. As I have had few literacy classes throughout my educational experience, I am excited to embark on this training.