This week I've tried to focus in on two key tools, Glogster and Diigo. I haven't found Glogster to be quite as intuitive as others, but I still see using it with my students regularly. I tried creating a "science biography," something I have all my low-level students do at the beginning of the year. I had a lot of fun and wished I had my home computer with more pics. I think I may be too much of a perfectionist though as I have spent entirely too much time changing layout and backgrounds and fields and such. I have so many kids that like to add an artistic touch to their projects and work that I think this may be a big breakthrough tool for motivating the "I'm not a scientist" kind of student. I think what I feel most limited by, though, is still not seeing the big picture of how this (these) technologies will fit into my classroom. I have made multiple personal projects, but need to see how these allow me to interact with my students and how my students will interact with each other.
Diigo is looking to be a promising tool for my advanced bio kids and all the research we do. We have several big research projects and a bunch of case studies where I have the kids keep a lot of paper info that could easily be stored online. Last year I had them organize their work into Google Docs which they could then easily share, but it seems like Diigo will easily "one-up" this. I really like that the kids will be able to keep all of their online research organized in one place with notes and highlighting all together that is easily searchable. I only wish I had something to research that I could use Diigo for personally before jumping into the classroom with it. Maybe when free time arises (hah!).
Did you try out Delicious at all before you looked into Diigo? I'm curious to know what some of the differences between the two may be. Regardless, I too am very excited to incorporate these types of bookmarking tools into my advanced bio curriculum. I think it will be useful for research projects as well as for collaborations throughout the year. I think my hope is to introduce the tool at the beginning of the year and continually utilize/reference it in studies throughout the year. By the end of the school year the kids will have hopefully put together a pretty useful online resource that they can ultimately continue to use in their science classes in future years. Also, it might be an awesome reference for exam review, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteI think I'm in the same boat as you. I've made several projects, but am I still trying to figure out how these will make my classroom more engaging. I haven't played around with diigo as much as I've wanted to as well, but I definitely see how it can help with researching.
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