Sunday, March 16, 2014

Blog Assignment # 8

21st Century Learning and Communicating Tools

Technology is becoming part of just about every lesson in todays classroom. Teachers need to find useful sites and resources that will benefit the students. I hope to teach a class of second graders some day. There are many sharing tools available to students. Diigo is one of those many sharing tools. Diigo is sharing tool that allows students to store, recall, and capture information. A common name used for sites like Diigo is social bookmarking tool. One of the important aspects of this tool is you can share your information with the whole Diigo network.

Diigo can be a useful tool for students because it allows them to save information anywhere not only in the classroom. It can also be used to help students catergorize websites they are using. Students can share information or websites with the Diigo social network. While using this tool you can also comment on bookmarks. This sharing tool is very useful for group work. Diigo is useful for projects that require teamwork.

Here are some reasons why Diigo could be useful in classrooms. The first good reason is it allows students to highlight notes or to add sticky notes to the page. This would become important in my classroom when my students are researching a topic or doing a project. Second, students can create a list of websites that are important to them. Third, students can join groups on topics that are interesting and useful to them. This gives the students time to explore new bookmarks that may help them in the future. Students can export bookmarks from Diigo to Delicious. That way you can use both tools when they are needed. The benefits of Diigo are it gives the students an opportunity for active learning. They are organizing information on their own.

I chose this tool because it is a safe way for students to search the internet in the classroom. Here is a video that will give you better insight on how to use Diigo in the classroom.



Another tool I would use in my classroom is Storybird. Storybird is a storytelling website that makes creating and telling stories fun. Students can be creative and work on their writing skills at the same time. I will use this in my future classroom because it will build a writing community for the students. With this tool students are able to share their work with other students. This is where peer evaluation would come in to play. The benefits of Storybird are literacy and self confidence for the students. I chose this tool because I thought it would inspire students to write. Here is a video that elaborates on Storybird and how to use it.





Storybird
Diigo

Storybird

2 comments:

  1. Great post Brittany! I have never heard of Diigo or Storybird. These tools will be great for your second graders, they are simple yet challenging. Storybird will be a great way for them to practice writing and it will allow them to express themselves. It is amazing how the learning tools have advanced, especially since we were in the second grade. Great job!

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  2. Good, but don't forget that you need to have working links on each blog post!

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