Diigo for Digital Writing Reflection

As I've written about in past posts, I feel quite strongly about the role of educators in equipping students with the skills they need for both life and learning in an increasingly digital world.  With respect to the essential skill of organizing web content, I've been having my students use the social bookmarking site Diigo since the start of the school year.  They've used it to keep track of information they find on the web, to share information with our class group, and also to respond to digital texts they read.  And even though the bookmarklet, Diigolet, is significantly less convenient than the Diigo toolbar (which can't be installed on our school computers), most of my students are now are at a point where they have seamlessly integrated this bookmarking tool into their web browsing. 

It was because of their proficiency with it that when an idea came to me today 5 minutes before the start of class of a new purpose for which I could have my students use Diigo, I didn't hesitate to throw out the plan I had in place and give it a try.  It went amazingly well.  So well, in fact,  that I have resolved to finish writing this post before I leave school today and officially start my spring break.

It seems like most of the posts in this blog have been in some way or another focused around my students using digital tools to compose.   Presently, the writing my 8th grade students are doing has taken the form of a fairly open writing workshop, where students write across various genres about about topics of importance to them, publishing these pieces to their blogs every couple of weeks. Here are some of the pieces they've done recently.

The purpose of such writing is for students to develop as writers and thinkers, while also establishing their presence in a global community of learners.  Assessment of how students meet these goals is done by the students themselves, as for each piece they publish they write a reflection where they identify and explain aspects of their piece that show the following:

   -evidence of themselves as thinkers
   -evidence of using revision to improve their writing
   -evidence of how they worked through challenges

I love using this method as a way to assess my students' writing, which I was introduced to last summer at the UNC Charlotte Writing Project.   It focuses students attention on their own process, encourages them to try new ideas and approaches, respects their diversity, and guides students in being better able to talk about their own thinking and learning.

Up until today, I've been having my students complete this reflective/metacognitive assignment by responding to these directions on their own sheet of paper, which they then would turn in to me. 

But this morning while I was preparing my class for the day, it occurred to me that Diigo's web highlighter and sticky note tools would allow students to carry out that same assignment without paper.  In addition, it would also take students less time to complete, let others read the reflections they wrote, and make it easier for me to access and assess their work. 

Student blog with Diigo highlights and sticky notes

If you are not familiar with Diigo, it is a free social bookmarking tool.  With it, users can bookmark web pages to their online library from any computer,  highlight text on web pages and include sticky notes with their own typed messages, and share these sites and annotations with others. Diigo also allows users to create groups, which I have done for my students, so that in addition to saving bookmarks to their own libraries, they can also save them to the group.

Since all of my students publish their writing on their individual blogs, they can use Diigo to bookmark their posts, highlight parts that demonstrate their thinking, revisions, and challenges, and include sticky notes on the page to include their written explanations and reflections.  Click here to see the full assignment. 

Student's highlights and sticky notes as seen in our class Diigo group library

Students would also select the option that allowed the page and its annotations to be shared with our class Diigo group, so when I or any other student visited our class Diigo library they could see each students' bookmarked blog post, and beneath that post, a display of the excerpts highlighted and the sticky note responses that had been recorded.

For grading, I only needed to visit our Diigo page and use this rubric to assess my students' work.  Alternatively, I could also visit the student's blog post, and so long as I had Diigo open on my computer, I could see the annotations on their post.  If I wanted to respond to any part of my students' reflections, I could use Diigo to type in my comments and they would then show up in my students' libraries.  Though I have not done so yet, I also see potential for students to respond to each other's assessments in the same way.

Now that I'm starting to rethink my uses of Diigo, I'm sure that some other new possible applications will come to me when as I start reading through these posts and pages of self assessments.  Honestly, I am excited to do so, but outside my window the empty parking lot and setting sun are telling me that grading can wait.  I'm sure my family would agree.

Hello Spring Break!

Research Writing 101, 2.0!

     This week my class moved into our next thematic unit, the Justice Unit.  It's one of my favorites, too.  In it, students get the chance to explore issues of social justice, both present and past, and interact with each other to develop their own perspectives and voices.

     I have units already made from last year, and all sorts of thought-provoking resources.  The only problem is after having going so long with letting my students direct the course of their own learning, I felt like my dictating the content we would be studying would be a step backwards. So, I didn't.

    We began with a discussion and debate attempting to come to some level of understanding of just what exactly "Justice" is. From here, I led my students through a series of quick-writes in response to the images on the following slide show:




    As we wrote and discussed, we also kept a list running of any topics that came to students' minds that they felt fell under the broad category of Justice.  The topics on the list were pretty similar to those I had brought into the unit in the past.  In place of taking any structured approach to teaching them, though I continued in the spirit of our Inquiry Project, and let students pick what they wanted to learn more about, taking advantage of the wealth of information on the web and some essential web tools.

    Of course, this process began with daybook brainstorming and writing, then once students had a topic and a sense of what they wanted to learn about it, they scoured the web to see what they could find.  As for instructions, I told them to base the start of their search on the questions they had written in their daybooks, but by no means should they be limited to those questions.

   "Right now, you don't know what you don't know," I said to them.  "And as you learn more about your topic, your going to think of new questions you'd like to know about it.  Make note of those new questions, and think of new ones as you discover the answers."

    I didn't want to place limitations on their learning.  But one direction that I did put in place, in no uncertain terms, was that Diigo needed to continue to be their partner in the process., but not just for bookmarking.  As students came across sites with relevant information, they were to use Diigo's highlighting feature to capture what they had found,  as well as post sticky notes summarizing key points and responses to what they have read.

A screenshot from a student's Diigo library

    My students are no strangers to Diigo.  They've been using throughout the past couple of months as they've engaged in their Inquiry Projects, where they searched the web for information of interest to them, bookmarked their findings, and used what they learned to inform a piece of writing that they would eventually publish to their blog.  The writing for the inquiry project was always creative or personal, and I forbid my students from writing reports or research papers. I didn't want them venturing into this genre until they knew how to write research the right way. 

   Now seemed like a good time to cross that bridge.

   The Three Day Research Paper

   Every year my students write research papers....and every year they seem to drag out for weeks on end.  It's a time-consuming process, and one that I never look forward to.  This year I decided that Diigo, along with my abbreviation of the writing assignment, would enable me to guide my students through the toughest parts of writing research in just a few days.

   These tough parts that I mention are teaching students how to paraphrase, synthesize ideas from multiple sources, make internal and bibliographic citations correctly.  In the past, I gave students organizers for recording information they found on the web, along with the information from the sites that they'd later use for citing.  Diigo took the place of this organizer, allowing students to keep all of their annotations in one place, while also keeping this information connected to the site where they found it.

   As for the creating the bibliography, this used to be an entire class period in itself, giving students handouts with the rules for writing source information in the proper format. I'm sure that there is value of knowing the basics of this format, but the last several years I've had my students use  Son of a Citation Machine or even the citation feature of Microsoft Word to do the work for them after they entered in the information on their sources.
   
    This week, the process became even more simplified as students created their bibliographies with the help of either Easybib or Bibme.  With these web tools, all students had to to was copy and paste the URLs of the sources they used, and the bibliography would be created for them in seconds (though not necessarily fully complete or correct).

     The web tools that I described above expedited the process of organizing and formatting written research.  Add to it that instead of writing research paper, I only asked my students to write a paragraph or two focused upon drawing in several sources to answer a single question, this week was the quickest, and perhaps one of the most productive, written research project I've ever had my students carried out.

The full requirements that I gave my students for the assignment can be seen here.

And a list of all of their writing that they published to their blogs can be seen here.

-----
     I think that I'd like to preface my reflections on how this all turned out by saying that in no way do I feel that  what my students were engaged with this week could replace the writing of a real research paper; in about a month we'll be revisiting the process with the purpose of doing just that. Nor do I believe that such a quick and limited experience is enough to teach my students all they should know about writing research at an 8th grade level.  A quick glance over some of their writings reveals plenty of rough edges.

But....

   This assignment was an awesome introduction to the process. In just these few days, students learned about strengthening their writing with others ideas, using the work of others fairly, the purpose of organizing web content for future use, and even a little about website evaluation (I plan to discuss this in a later post).   And this all took place while students learned about a multitide of relevant and important topics.

    I think that this week was an important step in the right direction.  While chances are that when we take on a larger scale research paper in a few weeks that my students' writing still won't be worthy of publication in a scholarly journal, I feel pretty good about what they will be able to do as they build upon the foundation this mini project has set in place.  Now that I'm not going to have to spend as much time introducing my students to the concepts of citing, we can focus more on the actual writing. I'm already getting excited thinking about the chance to be able to talk more with students about writing than incorrectly written citations....though I'm sure I'll have plenty of these conversations, too.

   One step at a time, I guess.  Tomorrow, when my students come in, they're going to have the the chance to learn from the research and writing of their classmates. Their assignment tomorrow is to take time reading the Justice Research pieces that their peers have published on their blogs, leave some comments, and take some notes on the reactions they have to the what they learn.  After engaging with this process for 30 minutes or so, they'll then refer to their notes and compose a post discussing their thoughts on the most significant social justice related matters confronting our society.  Within these posts, they'll link to the research written and published by their classmates, building their learning upon the learning of others, and laying the framework to take future collective action.  At least, that's what I hope will happen. 

   Either way, I'll be sure to write about it.

   As always, feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you may have.  I'm sure my students would love to hear the thoughts on what they've been up to as well  Check out thier work and feel free to leave them some constructive feedback!

The Digital Inquiry Project and "The New Culture of Learning"

      In Will Richardson's last blog post, he discussed a recently published book written by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas, titled,  A New Culture of Learning.   I haven’t read the book, but from what I have gathered through Richardson’s post, it addresses how the web and social media have made possible a new type of learning, one that schools will not be able to accommodate until they move away from the mechanized approach of distributing content, and toward teaching students the skills they need to learn in today’s social and information-rich web environment.
      
       In my post, Teaching Digital Learners to Learn Digitally,  I discussed what I felt was a need very similar to that identified by Richardson.  I wrote about how I wanted to rethink my responsibilities and place as an educator who is teaching students to live and learn in a society that is so rich with information, where knowledge can be both consumed and produced by anyone, anywhere. I wanted to teach my students how to use the web to learn, creating a culture that enables them to, as Brown and Thomas describe, “embrace what we don’t know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more and more, both incrementally and exponentially.”


       So, about five weeks ago I unveiled to my students what I called (uncreatively) the Digital Inquiry Project.  It entailed students scouring the web to learn about a topic of interest to them,  then using what they learn to inform a piece of writing, which they would publish on their blog.   

      The project would be ongoing, individualized, and would continually build upon the learning that students were doing.  It would, I hoped, teach students how to use digital tools to facilitate their own inquiry, while guiding them in becoming better learners, thinkers, readers, and writers.  It would make them players in the “new culture of learning” and set them on the path that they'll continue down for the rest of their lives.  So far, it’s going pretty well.  There have been plenty of learning experiences for us all along the way, and though by nature this project will always be a work in progress, I feel like things have shaped up enough now for me to sit down and write about it.


Getting Started


       I knew better than to just kick off the project by telling students to turn to the web and learn about whatever they want; I had found out recently that many of my students wouldn't know where to start.  So we had to do some brainstorming first.  Students took time to do some quick-writes, to share ideas, and hear the ideas of others.  After a day of thinking about what they wanted to learn, most had enough direction to begin.


Marking the path


      With topics in mind, students' next step was to turn to turn to the web to seek out information.   


       Before they dove in, however, I wanted to be sure my students were able to stay organized as they navigated the vast and sometimes choppy waters of the World Wide Web.  For this, I required that they use a web tool that would enable them to keep track of content AND the thoughts they had while reading it, so that they could later access it when they needed to.  This necessity for any digital learner is social bookmarking, and for it, we used Diigo.


    So, the directions for the web inquiry part of the project looked like this:

1.   Search the web for information on your topic
2.   Bookmark web pages that had information they found to be important AND
3.   Highlight relevant text and insert sticky-notes of thoughts and ideas on those web page

     That was it.  Students were free to follow their own curiosities as they inquired about their topic, so long as they bookmarked their findings, marking their path along their way.  


    The process went surprisingly well, too.  Many of my students took on topics that were complex and relevant, such as conflicts overseas, religion, bullying, and abuse.  Other students dug into topics that I would have considered weak or frivolous for the direction I envisioned for this project, but I stayed fairly hands-off.  Some of those students eventually took it upon themselves to change their inquiry topics, but others stuck it out....and surprised me when they uncovered information and conversations that I never would have expected.   


Writing to learn (and learning digital writing)


     Of participating in this new learning community, Thomas and Brown wrote that,  “the goal is for each of us to take the world in and make it part of ourselves. In doing so, it turns out, we can re-create it.”


     The Internet has transformed knowledge into a much more dynamic entity, one that is continuously evolving as individuals build upon it.  In order for the Digital Inquiry Project to direct students toward the goal Thomas and Brown describe above, it had to ask more of students than simply asking questions and bookmarking sites with the answers.   


    Which is why writing needed to fit in.

     Students were to write a piece that was informed by the learning of their inquiry. They could compose in any genre, and integrate their new-found learning in any way. Doing so, they would make meaning of, and build upon, the new information they learned, and when they published their writing on their blog, they would then establish their roles as participants and contributors in the learning community.


    But that’s not exactly what happened....at least not at first.


    I expected, given the choice that was afforded to them, that the genres of writing they began drafting would be equally as varied as the topics they had selected to research. But shortly after students started writing their first piece, I realized that this wasn’t the case.  Just about every one of my students decided that the genre of "report" would be the shape their piece would take.   


     Now, I am not opposed to students writing reports or research papers; after all, as an 8th grade teacher I am required by the state to have my students write them.  That’s not what I wanted for this project, though.  I wanted writing to be more personal, more meaningful and creative.  If students were going make meaning from their learning and build upon it, they needed to go beyond regurgitating what they had found on the web.  


     And besides, who likes writing reports?  I was fairly certain my students didn't, and when I asked them  why they had all chosen to write in this same genre, they had no explanation.  


        The best explanation, I decided, was that using new learning to inform more creative types of writing was just plain hard....harder than writing a report, and that this path of least resistance, combined with the fact that students weren't used to such free range in writing, led many to decide to fall back upon what they knew.


      At this point, about two weeks in to the Digital Inquiry Project, I changed the writing requirement to the following:

• Use your inquiry learning to inform a piece of writing, written in any genre...except a report or essay.

    Without question, this change has been the most important revision the project has underwent thus far.  It’s upped the rigor and has opened the flood gate of my students' creative juices.   


      In the short time where my students have been using this aspect of the project to write creatively, I’ve seen them want to know more about their topics, ask new questions, and make personal connections to their research.  But it’s not just thinking and learning my students are getting better at through writing....they’re growing as writers too.  They are playing with new styles, finding their voice, and forging their identities as writers.


      The written aspect of Digital Inquiry project as taken on a form very similar to the writing workshop I’ve done with my students in years past.  Students have choice about what they write, engage in writing as a process, interact with others over their writing, and eventually publish and share their work with a wider audience.  I teach through modeling exemplar texts, I teach mini-lessons on craft, and I address individual needs through conferences. 


        Where it differs, though, is not only the fact that the Digital Inquiry writing it is informed by learning.  The most significant difference is that students' writing for their Digital Inquiries is done digitally.  

      I’ve taught students about tags, hyperlinks, and Creative Commons.  I’ve introduced them to html, widgets, and Google Forms, and guided them in creating and embedding digital posters, videos, animations, and comics.   Helping my students become digital writers has required me to learn and teach a new set of skills.  It's been exciting for me, but this change in my instruction is hardly the most significant of the transformations that this project has initiated in my class.

     Digital writing has afforded my students a new level of meaning in their compositions.  I'm seeing my students think beyond just words, and with having additional outlets for their expression and an audience of the world, few, if any, are ever not engaged.   

     I've written about my desire to get my students blogging in past posts, like this one and this one, but I had trouble deciding on the right role that student blogs would play in the writing we did in class.   Turns out The Digital Inquiry Project provided just the spot.


Managing a Digital Inquiry

                                                                     

Requirements

           Creating the requirements for this project was a bit of a balancing act.  If I made them too tight and specific, then some would only work to meet the minimum, while others would be stifled by the tight parameters.  On the other hand, if my guidelines were too loose.....well, anyone who knows middle school could tell you how that would turn out.

What I tried to do is put guidelines in place that gave direction but facilitated student ownership and creativity.

First, I told students that the expectations I had of them while engaged in this project was that they were always thinking, continuously learning, and publishing excellent writing.

Then, to provide a sense of direction, I gave the following specific guidelines:

1. Use Diigo to bookmark, highlight, and annotate web pages
2. Use your learning to inform writing pieces that you publish on your blog.
3. Submit at least one published blog post every two weeks
4. Upon publishing a piece of writing, immediately begin the inquiry process again 

     I then gave students additional guidelines specific to their published blog posts.  These requirements I’ve built upon each week as I’ve taught mini-lessons on various digital writing topics.  I expect that they will continue to remain fluid, but as of now, the guidelines for students' published posts are that they:

• are thoughtful and polished, reflecting significant time spent revising and editing.  
• have a minimum of two relevant hyperlinks
• contain tags
• have at least one image, Creative Commons properly attributed

Assessment

The tangible, objective requirements of the inquiry project that I mentioned above factor into student assessment, but focusing completely on areas such as proper use of images and spelling and grammar would send students a message about the focus of this project contrary to where it ought to be.   What is most important, and what I want to focus the assessment upon, are the three objectives that I had initially told students were in place for this project: that through their inquiry, they would be continuously thinking, learning, and developing as writers.  

Because of the enormous variation among students not only in topics researched and genres written, but also learning styles and writing abilities, there is no objective way for me to determine and assess students’ thinking, learning, and writing process.  The only honest way to know the degree to which students were meeting the objectives I had set for this project would be if they showed me how they went about meeting them. The best assessment would have to be self-assessment. 

Keeping their published blog posts on their computer screens and this handout in front of them, students wrote reflections on how their writing demonstrated thinking and learning, the challenges they encountered, and  how their writing has evolved.

-----------

Like most things "school," guidelines, expectations, requirements, and deadlines did exist for this project, but I want to emphasize that the focus is not on an end product.  The Digital Inquiry Project is about a process.    One where students are continually reading, writing, thinking, and learning.  It embraces the idea of "not knowing," and empowers students to use free digital tools to find answers on their own, answers that will invite new questions and curiosities, thereby perpetuating process. 

           I've included some descriptions and links to blog posts my students have written through their Digital Inquiries.  I'm sure they'd love to get some responses to their writing!

• Carol, interested in myths and legends, began the Dragon Diaries, where she is developing her own fictional narrative told from the point of view of one of the mythical creatures.
• Tania, motivated by the food see sees being wasted, wrote about the issue through the eyes of a homeless man.
• Crystal, interested in urban legends and ghost stories, wrote her own version of the Blair Witch Project.
• Erin, who began her research trying to uncover answers about religion, surveyed her peers with a Google Form on her blog and wrote this report of her findings.
• Talazya wanting people to know about gymnastics safety, composed a rap and performed it in this popular podcast.
• Nathan has taken on the stance of a news reporter, writing about the conflict between North and South Korea
• This student, interested in what makes a successful relationship, wrote a script, which she later intends to record and publish as a podcast.

The Responsibility of Teaching Digital Safety

       Last Friday I got my students started on social bookmarking with Diigo.  As I mentioned in my last blog, it was a great lesson.  Part of my excitement was due to how smooth the process went...I showed my students how to sign up for Diigo, join our group, and install and use Diigolet to bookmark and annotate web pages.   With very few questions, they caught right on.  It was the most seamless start up process for any web tool that I've used this year, and I wanted to think that this was due to how I had been successfull in teaching my students to navigate unfamiliar web pages on thier own.  

      Of course, when I began to pat myself on the back, I realized there was something that I hadn't considered.

      There is an important difference between the accounts students created for for Diigo and the other sites they've used: the Diigo accounts were public.  I mentioned this to students in my conversation with them about why social bookmarking could be advantageous, but I didn't address the limitations.  I didn't think I needed to.....that was until I began noticing that students were including personal information in the profiles they were setting up on Diigo...information about their identity and their personal lives, information that might be OK for them to share on our team's private social network, but not on a public space on the web. 
    
     I decided late last night that the lesson I had planned originally on Monday would have to wait a day.  We needed to talk about digital safety.

    To get the conversation started, I showed my students the following two videos and gave them time to write down their thoughts about them (thanks, Clif Mims for putting me on to these):



       After students had the time to write down their initial responses, I opened the floor for them to share what they thought.  The conversations took a different turn in each class, but each shared some common themes.  Most expressed that the idea of making smart decisions with one's personal information online was not news to them.  They've heard the message over and over.  They've seen To Catch a Predator, and know not to talk to strangers online.  But in our conversation, many students also expressed how they had never given much thought to people other than their intended audiences viewing what they put online.  This was especially true for information they may post on sites where they can restrict who has viewing access.  Most of our conversation focused on how this "private" information could still get out and how easy it would be for it to travel quickly across the Internet....possibly into the hands of people like the guy selling movie tickets (in the first clip).
       With these thoughts in mind, I gave students time to go back to the accounts they've set up in school (both private and public), and revise their profile and account information.  All were anxious to revisit their profiles, examining their words and images closely....even the students who claimed that they were experts of online safety.

       I'm glad that I decided to make time for this lesson.  It wasn't spectacularly planned, and it didn't take much class time, but it was and absolutely necessary.  Both the students and I assumed that online safety is common sense, but as we've come to see, it's not.  We needed to have the conversation that started today, and it's even more important that I allow it to continue the rest of this year.

       My students, as digital learners, deserve nothing less.

Using Technology to Support a Great Critical Media Literacy Lesson

This week started off fairly low tech; I showed students a VHS tape of an old (but classic), black and white episode of the Twilight Zone.  The episode, titled  "The Eye of the Beholder"  brought about an interesting conversation about the nature of "beauty" and the factors that influence our understanding of it.  The discussion served to raise plenty of questions and a variety of opinions,  but as a class,  students only found a couple areas of consensus....one, that there is no one set standard for beauty, it varies from person to person; and two, that our environment influences what we perceive as being beautiful.  One influence that students identified as being most significant was the images we see in the media.

With those ideas in mind, students brought in magazines and examined the characteristics of the people shown in the advertisements, making lists of the characteristics we noticed of the men and the women featured in the ads.  These characteristics students typed into a Google Form I embedded on my website, enabeling me to paste these characteristics into a Wordle  (shown below).  The next day, students begain class by gluing these word clouds into their daybooks and writing about what they thought they revealed.

For Men:                                                                         For Women

After briefly discussing the thoughts these Wordles elicitited, we then watched and wrote responses from the following video from Dove:




As you could imagine, this sparked quite a bit of discussion, and with that discussion, more questions.....We decided that something wasn't right....that our perception of beauty was based upon seeing people that were edited by computers.  But we just couldn't figure out what consequences this reality of our society might have and why advertisers did this.

So, when we couldn't arrive at the conclusions we needed through discussing and putting our heads together, we looked outside of our classroom walls...to the web! 

Before students went to the web, though, I first introduced them to a tool that would make our search more collaborative and effective: social bookmarking.  Students created accounts on Diigo, then joined a class group that I had created.  I gave them an overview of how social bookmarking works and a brief tutorial about how to use the tools offered by Diigo and save websites to our group. 
      *NOTE: Teaching new technology always take a little time, but the lessons I learned from my previous post still held true today.   I also took an additional step this week of creating screencasts on Screentoaster of the steps I woudl be demonstrating and embedding them on my website, so students could refer to them if they got stuck. 

Armed with this awesome new web tool, students took to the web to find out what they could about advertising, the media, teens' self-image, and society's perception of beauty.  This is a huge topic, but with 70 of us working together and collaborating on Diigo, we managed to find over 50 sites on the topic and converse across classes about the information that we found on them:

Our new understanding and the information that we found is going to lead us into next week.  Starting Monday, students are going to get their own blogs started on Blogger and begin crafting their first posts, in which they will write about their opinions relating to self-image and the media.  Within these posts, I'll also introduce students to the digital composing skill of hyperlinking, enabling them to include links in their writing back to the information we found this week.