Presented by Leslie A. Sassone, Northern Illinois University

Named project "Teacher-as-Researcher" to help students think philosophically, combatting the "you teach me what I need to know" approach.

Each student asked to pick a school and go research it (e.g. montessori, waldorf, vocational, magnet, etc.): roles of teacher, political implications, educational philosophy, etc.  Morphed assignment away from creating a physical report product to instead using Diigo to collect and share resources.

Required tags include name of school, etc.; optional tags include educational model used, etc.

Considerations/options:

• Use milestones to avoid students having last-second submission problems.
• Use educator account to create separate groups for each class section and invite students into the private groups.
• Keeping the links private (to avoid students copying work from previous classes) vs. making links public (to continue to grow the list of links to be a more full resource).
• Yet another system for students to learn and use (some students complained about this).
• Even with private group, lists must be shared/public in order to create slideshows.
• Was criticized because she didn't integrate Diigo enough in the course--students wanted more.
• Be sure to provide sufficient instructions/best practices for using Diigo upfront.
• Provide a simple practice activity where students are graded for applying "correct" tags to pre-selected sample pages.
• Danger (as with all organic tools of organization) is lack of commonly-shared or commonly-understood tags.  Example was given of a student referring to "graphic novels" in his presentation but used "comics" as the tag.
• Consider having use of Diigo be part of the assessment and the communication/content vehicle--have comments about links be housed within Diigo, evaluate students based upon number of resources, number of comments, etc.
• Ask students to update thier profile with at least a photo to help foster the social nature of the Diigo site.
• Risk of student apathy.
• Encourage students to highlight key text on the page just before bookmarking so as to auto-populate the description field.
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