Catchphrase on the Smartboard

Linda — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:19:45 +0000

Game playing on the IWB has to be more fun and interactive than watching a video – right? Preston College is generous enough to share it’s CPD so in the interests of using my smartboard interactively rather than it just being a projector:

The point is that by sharing this on Youtube Preston College didn’t just provide CPD in an easily accessible format for their own staff. Any other teacher any where in the world can quickly and easily learn from this video, watch it as often as they need to, practice and refine the technique they’ve learned and possibly in time share it with others. Maybe even make a video of their own learning that builds on this.

Good stuff

Using Diigo to collect evidence of my continuing professional development

Linda — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:27:06 +0000

As part of my adult education teaching I need to provide evidence of my continuing professional development. This needs to include the sources, time spent and evidence of direct benefit to my learners. As my commitment to formal teaching is small I have only to account for 6 hours a year, full time lecturers need up to 30 hours.
I’ve been looking for a way to automate and formalise my informal learning. All that browsing and bookmarking, finding annotating and sharing resources and even some tweeting adds up to many more than 6 hours a year.

Using Diigo for Bookmarking

Web 2.0 services sometimes desert us when we’ve taken them for granted. I was a long term user of a service called Furl which recently closed & I had to transfer all my bookmarks to diigo with very little warning. I’ve used diigo spasmodically for bookmarking and I decided to use this as an opportunity to explore some of diigo’s more powerful features.

AutoBlogging with Diigo

It’s easy to set up diigo to post bookmarks and their annotation directly to your blog. You add your blog and then set up a ‘job’ to post bookmarks for a specific tag. You can choose how frequently to post them but for my purposes once a week should be sufficient.

I’ve created a designated author with it’s own user name and password on my wordpress blog here to use for this service. This means I’ve given this user limited rights and not revealed my admin password to an external service. I feel a little more secure this way! I’m not crazy about auto-posting but this is at least my own content & not at all spammy.

Diigo Bookmarklet

I was slightly put off diigo at first as I thought you had to use their installed toolbar. However I’ve since discovered there’s a very easy to use bookmarklet you can drag to your tool bar to make bookmarking easy. It gives you many more options than is usual with social bookmarking sites. You can highlight text, add sticky notes and annotate. All of these are public and can be seen even by those not logged in to diigo, so long as they followed your diigo link to get there. (Jose wrote a very detailed post about using this feature with students – must remember to bookmark it and claim the cpd time!)

Convert to PDF

As needed I can use this convert to pdf service to produce a hard copy of my evidence of continuing professional development.

Time spent

About 40 mins, 20 mins reading, 20 mins writing this post.

Benefit to students

Realised I can use this bookmark collection technique with my next class to provide more detailed guidance when viewing online content. Need to be careful to just provide guidance and leave room for their own discoveries. Wish I’d time to actually show them how to use it but we are too pushed already!