Unfortunately it has been a while since I have been fit to write as I have been off of work, away from school with a nasty bout of tonsilitis. On a course of penicillin tablets for it now which tastes completely rancid by the way! I am feeling back to my normal self at the moment and have had a full week in school which has been busy as ever.
Throughout this week in our Year 5 classes I have planned to utilise our class Diigo account for some simple comprehension work on instructions. Diigo is a tool that allows you to add annotations and sticky notes to any web page – making the most text heavy site partly interactive. As the children roll over these highlights or sticky notes they can read the pop-up message or comment. I have used it to pose some questions about an instructional text on making a healthy smoothie. The text itself is on the excellent WikiHow website and is in fact a piece of shared writing I completed last year with my year 6 class when we did instructional text too.
The children have been working on laptops during the group time in our literacy lessons at this task. The activity has rotated throughout the week so all the children can experience it. Once the children have read a question they can view the text immediately in front of them and they have no need to navigate away to a different window etc. In an ideal world I would have liked the children to answer using something like Google Notebook which is still very much my intention. But I thought that I needed to take things slowly and explore the use of Diigo first. So the children answered the questions in their jotters – a more nostalgic notebook shall we say!
They have enjoyed the task this week and have been engaged and motivated – the problems seem to be the tendency to move the sticky notes around the screen, so the order has been a bit lost. One or two notes have also mysteriously disappeared. I have been signing into the Diigo account so we can see our private annotations, but I suppose that if the notes were public and we didn’t sign in then no alterations could be made. They could be viewed but would be protected. Mmm I will test this out.
del.icio.us has proven to be an invaluable tool with so much constant access to technology with our laptops in lessons. Our Year 6 teachers are getting stuck in too, so our school’s weblink resource will no doubt begin to grow and grow. A great tool for any school that I cannot recommend highly enough!
Sounds like you have quite the innovative classroom! To supplement what you’re learning, One Economy’s ZipRoad and The Beehive offer you online resources and links to help solidify the concepts being taught in the classroom via e-learning and online methods. Please check out http://www.ziproad.org and http://www.thebeehive.org for more information!
Thanks,
Taylor Dixon
Marketing Intern
One Economy Corporation
see http://groups.diigo.com/
Kim, Alexander and Wade many thanks for the comments – it was an engaging task and as I said in the post the children thoroughly enjoyed doing this style of text comprehension.
Wade could you please elaborate on what you mean by a diigo group?
Down here in Sydney Australia many wonderful web tools are blocked at school – flikr, wikis, google documents, toondoo, rock you – the list goes on. We are on holidays at the moment – so here’s hoping that when I get back to school and try Diigo it will work 🙂
Tom,
Getting a diigo group set up for your class and using group annotations should be a good solution to some of the problems you have, such as sticky notes getting moved around.
Kim,
Wonder why you think diigo will be blocked in school?
Tom, this looks great – how did the kids go, using Diigo? I have a feeling Diigo will be blocked at my school – but maybe “they” haven’t seen it yet and it won’t be blocked (yet 🙁 )
Thanks for sharing.