14 Diigo with Duncan Carlsmith — 09.18.2015

In the Active Teaching Lab on September 18, 2015, Duncan Carlsmith from Physics shared how he blended his teaching with Diigo. We got a chance to see the strategies and examples he’d developed and tried out Diigo on our own.

Key Takeaways

• Possible ways to use Diigo:
  • Teach students to find and read original research that interests, inspires, or engages them, or answers their own scientific questions — this is a lifelong learning skill.
  • Contribute to networking literacy with a goal of building relationships (read it, like it, list it, share it, augment it, discuss it).
  • Develop subject literacy by reading articles critically.
• Diigo is quite easy for students to get in and use; that is a big selling point.
• Every click costs you 90% of your customers — so Diigo is one click to share it with the group/class — fewer clicks than posting in a D2L discussion forum.
• Another tool — “Paper Pile” — Josh Harder uses it; it’s a paying service.
• If you have an “educator account” in Diigo (or maybe if you are the owner of a group?), you have access to a teacher console that allows you as the instructor to see activity reports on what your student/group is doing.
• You can use embed code to put updating list of post/articles into a website — through a Diigo feed widget.
• Multiple people can annotate the same document — webpage and/or pdf.

If you’re interested in learning more to get up and running with Diigo, watch the videos below and try stepping through the Diigo worksheet we created for the session! You can also check out Duncan’s slides, posting rubric, and commenting rubric.

The Active Teaching Lab, a Faculty Engagement program, provides a safe space for structured explorations of cool teaching tools and techniques that your colleagues are using to engage students and teach more effectively. During the academic year, labs are held weekly and will be listed on the Active Teaching Lab page.

Duncan’s Diigo Story