[Grade 9] Using Diigo for bookmarking websites? It’s a must!

 

My Grade 9 students use Chrome and today we made sure that each one of them has the Chrome bookmarklet on his/her browser bar. Since we use Chrome we added the Chrome extension called Diigo web. Learning proper bookmarking skills is an essential skill for everyone in my opinion. 

My discussion with the class
What do you do when you find a good article on the Internet and you want to keep a record of it it later use? The best way is to ‘bookmark’ it quickly and simply. Bookmarking is an online process. So the question becomes ‘How do you bookmark sites when you are surfing the Internet?’ 

There are so many superb ways to do this ‘bookmarking’ but one of my favourite bookmarking sites is Diigo (http://diigo.com) because of all the amazing options that it offers.  A really great thing about using Diigo to bookmark a site is that once you have bookmarked it (and it takes about one or two seconds to do this), it will be available on all the devices that you use simply because it is done online.

How to use Diigo
As soon as you click on the little blue Diigo icon a window opens and from there you stay simple and simply 'save' and give it a name or category when the save button opens up;  or you can go further and use some of the useful options such as seen on the image on the right..

I found a really good YouTube Diigo video tutorial on 'How to use Diigo' by David Knapp (6 minutes in length) and I have embedded it below.  It elaborates really well on the following:

• how to sign up for Diigo.com
• how to create tags to categorize the websites you save so you can easily search for it later i.e. Science, Maths, reading etc
• how to add the Diigo bookmarklet to your browser menu bar for easy capturing
• how to add your bookmark to a list
• how to also save your bookmark to a ‘group’
• how to add a Diigo extension to Chrome for easy bookmarking
• how to annotate  a website while you are reading it
• how to add a sticky note to a website
• how to easily navigate to the sites you have saved
• how to share lists with others

Take a look at the tutorial  here:



Classroom use for Diigo
Diigo is a useful tool to introduce to your students if you are a teacher. Apart from simply saving a website they find online they can study the content online using the various options of annotating, highlighting, creating sticky notes etc.

Watch how this second grade teacher uses Diigo with her class! The video is called ‘Diigo how to homework for 2nd grade’.




There’s so much more you can do with this amazing bookmarking site – but this is a good beginning. Really, you must give this site a try. Whatever device you use, knowing how to bookmark using Diigo is a must for productive Internet surfing!

Further reading PLN Challenge #7: Using Diigo as part of your PLN

[Grade 9] Preparing to blog - creating a blogging manifesto

I am very keen for my Grade 9 class to have their own blogs as this is a fantastic way to teach online safety. I read a lovely blogpost by Jacqui Murray about creating a blogging manifesto with a class and decided to use this idea with my Grade 9 class. What are good guidelines for young bloggers? My thought was that we would discuss the topic and create some guidelines for ourselves in preparation for when we create our blogs.

We then started on the process of creating our own blogs using Blogger. Here is the presentation I made for the students to refer to if they felt lost!



Their final task was to:

• Pretty up their blogs by adding a background etc. 
• Add a post today about the blogging manifesto we created

[Grade 9] Make notes when watching an online video using Videonot.es

There are so many amazing educational videos in YouTube. How does one easily make notes from a video? I thought I would introduce the class to VideoNotes today. 

• The students were first of all introduced to Google Drive.I made sure they know how to log in to their Google Drive account.
• We then look though and discussed this presentation I made on using on Videonot.es.

The task I set was that they would use VideoNotes to summarise a video about blogging. I found a useful video on YouTube called ‘How to blog’. This is all in preparation for the blogs we will be creating soon.)



The students first opened Videonot.es and then opened the blogging video into the Videonotes interface. They summarised the video and then shared the file with me in Google Drive so that I can mark the file and return it via Google Drive.

This all worked REALLY well. I love using VideoNotes and highly recommend it!

[Grade 9] Learn about Google search using the Chrome browser

Google Chrome is a really good browser to use and I want ot make sure my students know all its benefits. Today's task centred around learning how to use Google Chrome to search for information one needs for completing school tasks.

Here is the presentation we used in class



Exploring Google Chrome
a) We signed in to Google Chrome yo create our own profiles
b) We added some useful extensions - Diigo bookmarking, Google Dictionary, Text to Speech, Google Translate, Basic calculator, Google similar pages,
c) We tried out some of the useful search tips using Chrome's omnibox

Short Videoclips we watched today
These are lovely. The students enjoyed watching both of them.

a) Chrome fun




b) Google search highlights 2012

[Grade 9] Using Padlet to get to know my Grade 8&9 students

Today I had my first lesson with my Grade 8 and 9 group and of course it was a day of using ice breakers to get to know them. I also told them about about using Padlet as a way of interacting with others, and to demonstrate this I showed them the presentation I had created on Padlet. Padlet is a great way to get discussions going and if you would like to create one yourself sometime please follow the instructions on this presentation. 




Both classes then introduced themselves on the Padlet wall. I think they also enjoyed reading what their peers had written.http://padlet.com/wall/rockacademy8and9