Nice thing about parent teacher conferences is they sometime give you time to talk to the people you work with. I am finding the work that Danielle and Robert are doing in their Humanities class interesting. They have taken something fairly straight forward and made it into an ongoing activity that the students enjoy.
As Robert and I were talking about the activity I realized that this was similar to something I used to do in Abu Dhabi. As part of what I did with blogging, I would to give students a choice of a few articles to read based on the same topic. I also asked to do some research to find other related articles and bookmark them using Furl they then commented on three other blog posts.
They have added Diigo to a similar idea. They have all of their students read one article and use the Diigo highlighting tool to pick out key ideas and “show evidence of careful reading”. Using some writing prompts the students then create a blog post on what they have read and analyzed. Once they complete the blog post they comment on three other posts. When all of this is done Robert also has them share one thing they have learnt with each other.
I think I will be using this with my grade eight classes in their Digital Identity Unit. It will be a bit different as the articles I use will be on this one topic. Most of the legwork has already been done thanks to Danielle and Robert so this will be easy to start. Think I will add the creation of a podcast of the student take aways as well. I have made this one of my personal professional goals as well and will be documenting this with Mahara.
Things always seem to work better when you share and collaborate.
Related posts
- Working With Diigo (teachnbabble.com)
- Random Thoughts Social Bookmarking and Peer Editing (teachnbabble.com)
