The most I have ever learned in teaching is through my conversations with other teachers and my personal experience. I have always been frustrated when forced to read a textbook for PLU or when someone whom has never taught starts to tell me how to instruct or discipline my classroom. I have always enjoyed sitting down with teachers and breaking down what has worked in each their classrooms. However you are limited with only your school and their ideas; when teachers all over the world have a wealth of experience that you can draw from. So how do we get access to this knowledge? Well if you were like me you would start searching websites and scouring for hours finding the best idea for the lesson you are attempting to teach. Then you lose that site, or it gets updated or the site is changed or you struggle to find other variances of the lesson. This is where Diigo come in.
“Diigo is a tool that not only allows you to begin constructing your own little piece of the Web, it’s a way of organizing it for yourself and for those you are collaborating with.” (Richardson, 2010) The ability to organize your bookmarks into simple tags that you can always reference is the primary tool of this site. But Diigo is so much more, you can save the site at its current state, highlight key points that you thought were meaningful, leave a sticky note giving your thoughts and share all of this information with everyone who is following you. This allows us to take information that we learn from teachers all over the world and not only gain knowledge but then spread it to teachers who follow us. So in an era when collaboration only used to exist in between the walls of your school, now the walls are blown open and ideas are spread worldwide.
To give you an example of how it works, I have been curious about using inquiry in my classroom. So I found a link on KQED which address’ 8 ways to incorporate inquiry in your class. You can see that I have highlighted key points that interest me, as well as put a sticky note comment addressing my concerns of the inquiry method. This would be great to share with other teachers who follow me and see how they address inquiry and if they can answer my concern with incorporating it in my class.
The next site that fascinated me was: Bowling with Bumper Rails: iPad Restrictions in Schools (Tech & Learning; Hooker, 2015). This article talks about the pros and cons of using iPad in the classroom, which I think would be a great tool for every student to be equipped with. But this article starts off with a great line “My parents were great at letting me fail and learning from that failure, but it led to some frustration” (Hooker, 2015). This line really hits home because students need to make multiple attempts to create learning, but understand that it is ok to make mistakes. To me Diigo allows us to learn from our mistakes, by researching the flaws in our lesson and seeing how other teachers handled those same mistakes.
Diigo breaks down the traditional walls that forced us to only collaborate with teachers in our school. Now we can work with teachers of all expertise, while sharing our ideas as well, and breaking down the ideas we have on that same page. Diigo makes the internet and everyone you follow work to help you create the best library of ideas which is centered on the topics you are focused on. Now our FOAF will be forever linked together to help find and share integral knowledge to continue to provide rigor in your classroom.
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. (3rd ed.). Thousand Oak, California: Corwin.
“Diigo is a tool that not only allows you to begin constructing your own little piece of the Web, it’s a way of organizing it for yourself and for those you are collaborating with.” (Richardson, 2010) The ability to organize your bookmarks into simple tags that you can always reference is the primary tool of this site. But Diigo is so much more, you can save the site at its current state, highlight key points that you thought were meaningful, leave a sticky note giving your thoughts and share all of this information with everyone who is following you. This allows us to take information that we learn from teachers all over the world and not only gain knowledge but then spread it to teachers who follow us. So in an era when collaboration only used to exist in between the walls of your school, now the walls are blown open and ideas are spread worldwide.
To give you an example of how it works, I have been curious about using inquiry in my classroom. So I found a link on KQED which address’ 8 ways to incorporate inquiry in your class. You can see that I have highlighted key points that interest me, as well as put a sticky note comment addressing my concerns of the inquiry method. This would be great to share with other teachers who follow me and see how they address inquiry and if they can answer my concern with incorporating it in my class.
The next site that fascinated me was: Bowling with Bumper Rails: iPad Restrictions in Schools (Tech & Learning; Hooker, 2015). This article talks about the pros and cons of using iPad in the classroom, which I think would be a great tool for every student to be equipped with. But this article starts off with a great line “My parents were great at letting me fail and learning from that failure, but it led to some frustration” (Hooker, 2015). This line really hits home because students need to make multiple attempts to create learning, but understand that it is ok to make mistakes. To me Diigo allows us to learn from our mistakes, by researching the flaws in our lesson and seeing how other teachers handled those same mistakes.
Diigo breaks down the traditional walls that forced us to only collaborate with teachers in our school. Now we can work with teachers of all expertise, while sharing our ideas as well, and breaking down the ideas we have on that same page. Diigo makes the internet and everyone you follow work to help you create the best library of ideas which is centered on the topics you are focused on. Now our FOAF will be forever linked together to help find and share integral knowledge to continue to provide rigor in your classroom.
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. (3rd ed.). Thousand Oak, California: Corwin.