After finally catching up with the weekend’s new posts from my subscriptions I decided that I should sign up to Diigo.  So many of the bloggers who I’ve subscribed to use the service that I felt compelled to give it a go.  I am impressed.  I thought del.icio.us was a nifty bookmarking tool, and it does beat the standard bookmarking tools ie and firefox provide, but it’s got nothing on Diigo.

I’m loving how I can highlight text, and add inline comments.  I now understand why everyone was raving about it and the applications it could have for my classrooms.  How cool would it be if I could bookmark a few sites for my students to visit, and briefly include some instructions right there on the web for them?  We could use the highlighting feature to emphasise note-taking skills.  THEY could use comments to jot down their thoughts right there on the web.  Quite simply I’m loving it.

Task Cards

Also, I’m working on putting together my first task card.  I’m liking the idea of generating three sets of cards (Maths, Science, and IT).  Most of the Maths and Science cards will be offline tasks not sure how to accomplish this yet, but given the limited access we have to computers in regular classrooms I don’t want to make life harder for myself.  I’d also like to make some IT cards offline activities – you just never know when there’ll be a technology crisis (eg. black out).

I’ve found some interesting Maths, Science, and General Knowledge stuff thanks to internet4classrooms, but haven’t yet found anything for IT.  This is a bit annoying as the classes I’m most likely to need task cards for will be IT classes.

I stumbled across a link to Dave Truss’ “Do not go quietly into the classroom” and I LOVE it

His slideshow “Brave New World-Wide-Web” makes it really obvious just how useful and empowering web2.0 really can be for education.

I will keep this slideshow “up my sleeve” for next year. It might be parents, community members, students, or colleagues or maybe all of them, but I just have a feeling that this is a resource that will make my life easier when I start doing some exciting Web2.0 stuff.