Monday 22 August 2011

5 Reasons to get started with Diigo



Organise - As you bookmark each page, tag it with keywords, which makes it easier to find later. You can tag sites with multiple tags.

Highlight - Select interesting passages from the text of the website and highlight them for quick reference later. This is great for those undertaking any research, particularly if you are working on a University paper or Masters.


Annotate - Add sticky notes to websites with important annotations, to help you remember key points or which part of your research that particular site relates to. These can be publicly viewable (or not) if you choose.

Share - One of the main differences between Diigo and regular bookmarking is that you can share your bookmarks with others. You can join or create groups for specific areas of interest, search others' bookmarks and share your research findings. Many hands make light work!


Education Accounts - registering for a free Diigo for Education account means you get access to a teacher console which enables you to create accounts for your students.

Why not set up a group for your class and have them search for useful websites at home? That way, you can maximize your face-to-face time by using the most useful websites, rather than spending valuable class time searching for information.

Check out the video below to learn more about Diigo, or catch your nearest Digital Literacy Coach to help you get started.

Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember! from diigobuzz on Vimeo.

Taking attendance for a a class that's not on your timetable.

Occasionally, teachers will be asked to cover for colleagues who can't themselves be there. In these cases, you need to be able to mark attendance for a class that's not on your timetable.  Here's how (thanks to Hemantha Dissanayake for the screen shots).

How to take attandance for another teacher from United World College of SE Asia on Vimeo.

Linking to other sites from your Studywiz course page.

This tutorial shows you how you can use your Studywiz course page to link to other sites like a blog, or Google site.  The suggested process has you editing the course's Information page.  You can put different types of information here like a course overview simply by pasting from an existing document or writing with the editing tools.  Building a list of links to other relevant course sites just means typing their names, highlighting them, then using the "link" button on the editor to get a window where you enter your URL.

Untitled from United World College of SE Asia on Vimeo.



Thursday 18 August 2011

Presentations - design matters

During our Professional Learning meeting in the Primary School, we focused on improving our presentations to parents.

Our core message was that less is more. We encouraged teachers to think from the perspective of their audience, and focused on 2 easy ways to improve the design of presentations:
  • Use fabulous images
  • Use less text
Fazree kindly videoed our presentation, and we will post it up here when it's ready to go.

In the meantime, please feel free to check out our slides (if you check the presenter notes you can see our prompts).

**Reminder**
To access the UWCSEA templates (keynote and/or powerpoint), connect to the stafffs server and look under college admin