Organized and Accountable Online Research

With students conducting more and more research online, Diigo can be an excellent tool for individual students, groups, and classes.
Students can organize their online research in three ways that are analogous to research with printed texts. Web pages can be bookmarked, described, and tagged for reference as was described in the January 13th post. With the Diigo Toolbar, students can highlight in one of four colours directly on the web page, and these sections will remain highlighted whenever the student visits the web page while logged in to Diigo. Finally, students can add freeform notes summarizing or extending what they read and attach them anywhere on the web page like "sticky notes." Like highlighting, these notes will appear in that location on the page every time the student returns to that web page while logged in to Diigo. All notes and highlighting are automatically extracted to the student's "Diigo Library," and can also be copied for use in other programs like Word.

By creating a "Diigo Group" for a group of students or a class, bookmarks and annotations are shared so that students can research a topic collaboratively and the teacher can monitor progress. The contributions of each student are identified meaning that individual assessment of the research portion of a group assignment is possible and fairly easy.

Field Testing

I tried Diigo for a small research assignment with my Grade 12 Learning Strategies class last semester and was pleased with the results. Diigo caters to educators by offering a free "Educator Account" upgrade which increases student privacy settings and adds a "Teacher Console" to create and manage student accounts and groups. Students found the highlighter easy to use and helpful, though the problem of over highlighting still persists in digital form. I expect that if students work more with extracted annotations they will see the importance of thinking critically as they read and highlighting selectively. I found evaluation worked well by giving a clear self-evaluation tool which I verified against their individually identified bookmarks and annotations in our class Diigo group.