Diigo, with a twist (reading comprehension).

[Sarah Hanawald]

I blogged recently about using Diigo with sixth graders. The whole post is here, but I'm putting an excerpt below.

I am a big fan of Harvey and Gouvis' work on the need to teach students reading strategies. Last year, students mentioned in their end of year surveys that we read too much non-fiction for our short texts and they missed reading short stories. Looking over the year, I realized they were right, we read very little short fiction although we still read novels.

In an effort to correct this, I decided to incorporate fairy and folk tales into our reading strategy instruction. I found two great resources for tales online. My teaching partner received a grant several years ago to explore the world of the Grimm Brothers. Usually, we like to use one or two of those tales in class. This year I found Professor D. L. Ashliman's collection of tales. These tales are, well, much "Grimmer" than the sanitized versions students are usually familiar with. Their background knowledge gives them the boost they need for comprehending these stories though, which have more complex vocabulary.

The other site is a more general collection of folk and fairy tales, from many cultures and time periods. It's part of the 4to40 website.

Here's the really cool part. The kids used the tools built in to Diigo to demonstrate their use of the reading strategies that we've been practicing with paper text. I used the Diigo for educators feature to set all the students up with an account that meets COPPA requirements. When it came time to assess the students' work I had such a great time. With all the stories to choose from, the students really felt that they genuine choices. Part of their grade was choosing a story that was appropriately challenging, but not too hard. (Differentiation, anyone?).

I try really hard not to give assignments that I'll dread grading. These were just plain fun to grade since I got to read a huge variety of stories through the students eyes. I hadn't read most of the stories in these versions before, so while it took a while to grade them, is was also truly pleasure reading for me. BTW, the students did beautifully and many mentioned that they really enjoyed the assignment. Wow--fun to complete and a pleasure to grade. In my world, that's about as good as it gets!

[Fred Bartels]

Sarah,

I'm wondering if you could explain a bit more how the kids are using Diigo for this project. It sounds quite interesting but I don't quite understand what they are doing.

Thanks,

Fred

[Sarah Hanawald]

Fred,
Sure! Diigo has built in tools (through a browser plug-in) that allow you to highlight, comment and post floating sticky notes on a webpage. These notes can be private or public ( we use private for reading comprehension assessment), then the user bookmarks the page and shares it with me. That way I can look at the same page and see all their highlights and comments. Here's a picture of what it looks like:

Does that help?
Sarah