Diigo in Close Reading

The Common Core Reading Benchmarks call for an increase in the lexile difficulty of student text, as well as an increase in the reading of informational text at all grade levels. This has led to many PDs on close reading strategies, and for me, some anxiety in the whole highlighter, coding, copying of materials.

"Is yellow used for main ideas, do we circle AND highlight?"

"What if I do not have the right colors or codification scheme?"

"All this coding needs to work for me if I am to be able to teach it to my students!"

As I sat pondering the answers to these questions, and at the same time refusing to run over to the copy machine to once again create hundreds of copies of papers that will then end up at the bottom of a backpack, crumpled up, before finally making their way to the recycle bin, I remembered another PD from several years ago about Diigo. As I vaguely remembered the tools, you could bookmark, highlight and add comments, so I figured, what about using that with the students? So I went on over, and came up with this structure for my students:

1. Yellow highlight - New words or confusing phrases (add a sticky note that defines the word or clarifies the phrase)
2. Blue highlight: Phrases the lead you to ask questions (add a sticky note that states the question - so that it can be posed during our class discussion)
3. Green highlight: Main idea
4. Pink highlight: Phrases that provide evidence or examples (add a sticky note that explains how this is an example or how the author provided evidence)
5. Sticky note(s) that provide your response to the article.

Using this scheme, I made a little exercise for myself: Diigo 

and it did work :) After some stumbles, I was able to annotate and then re-open the annotated page. I will need some more practice, but I was pleased with the ease with which I was able to accomplish the task.

Now this was done on a personal account, but supposedly with an educator account (free), you are able to also have students share annotations, which should lead to some interesting class discussions.

Right now, my only complaint is that I do not know how to change the "1" into some other character. Would it not be powerful if it could be changed into some of the coding (?,!,*,ex) that I am supposed to be teaching?

In any case, now I need to make sure we can use Diigo behind my school's firewall, and that I set aside time to download the toolbar on all our devices. (Hopefully a student job!)

I also see this as a wonderful addition to the research portion of our 20% projects.

Brainstorming for 20%

One of the things that scares me the most is guiding students through the choice of projects. How do I ensure the value of the time, while avoiding project jumping?

Two of my students actually live with me, (yes, I have both of my children in my classroom) and as I have been thinking about this project, I have shared with them the ideas behind it, as well as the challenges I envision. As kids often do, they immediately started thinking of ideas of what to do during 20%, given my boring constraint of "It has to be related to STEM in some way" (after all, that I know of,  Google does not support starting a garage band as part of their 20% time). So my son comes up to me and states, I am going to become a "Call of Duty" Master; it is a video game so it is STEM related. Although we did have a discussion on how this is not a good investment of his time and the like, I started thinking about how many of my other students would try something like this.

Enter two articles that I ran across almost by chance:

First "We don't Like Projects" (http://www.edutopia.org/blog/we-dont-like-projects-shawn-cornally), which gave me some questions to ask the students as they embark on this project (or any of our PBL units):

"Before granting resources to our students to begin working on their projects, we ask the following:
Is this something you'll be proud of in five years? Or will you at least be proud of the younger you for taking this on five years ago?
Does this combine two or more disciplines?
Will you work on this when no one is watching over you?
Who else cares about the results of your project?
What content do you think you'll learn? "

This first step gives me some guiding questions . I particularly like the third and fifth as a way to further put the learning at the fore-front of the students' minds as they tackle project selection.

Then, and almost magically "How to actually use Wikipedia in the Classroom" (http://www.edudemic.com/2013/07/how-to-actually-use-wikipedia-in-the-classroom/), which I envision as a starting point for students that might be mired in the "Just tell me what to do". If they first read an entry or two about a topic that interests them, they can jump to a series of questions related to "What is missing from this Wikipedia article? What do you think should be added? How can you ensure its reliability? Can you Google the answers to your questions, and what other questions then arise?" or something along those lines.

Will it work? I am not sure, but it is definitely worth a try :)

Why 20% Time is Good for Schools | Edutopia

Just in case you are still wondering, "Is 20% time worth it?"

Why 20% Time is Good for Schools | Edutopia