Beyond School

You are a young writer trying to experience what being a real writer is, because…your teacher is making you: sore spot one (but I can live with this one, for obvious reasons).

You are a young writer trying to have that experience by writing on a web-log (I’ve decided to outlaw the term “blogging” with students, and substitute the correct, grand old word: “Writing”), so that you can experience real audience, real feedback, real conversation based on your writing: blessing one.

You are a young writer who sees that someone has left a comment on one or your writings on your web-log (the word “blog” is a blighted thing as well, in the Language Arts classroom. From now on, we use “web-log”). What a delight–and a new one. You click the link, curious and expectant–how is the world responding to me as a writer?

But you see this:

You misspelled “frustrated.”
Is this a strong introduction?
Nice use of the appositive in Sentence Pattern 4, but your compound sentence in SP 3 is a comma splice because you forgot to include a coordinating conjunction after the comma.
B+.

Your teacher.

“Well,” you say, “It was interesting. Thanks, but no thanks. Back to MySpace for some real conversation.”

Luckily, Chris Watson sparked an idea in one of our podcasted conversations about this problem: Somehow find a way to use Diigo to assess student web-log writing without defacing the students’ “intellectual property” and turning writing into “schooliness.”

So here’s my latest experiment, with thanks to Chris (and to Diane Quirk, who suggested this much earlier): using Diigo Groups (with a separate Diigo login for me, to keep my own bookmarks separate from my classroom bookmarks).

My students have joined the Group. Now when they go to their web-logs, after logging in to their Diigo account and setting “Show Annotations > Show Group Annotations” on their Diigo toolbar, they will see the highlights of specific passages from their writing that I have left (and I can start students doing this too, it occurs to me in a very attractive flash), and my annotations will pop up on their screen when they hover their mouse over the highlights.

Also good, our Diigo Groups Bookmarks page records all highlights and annotations I have made on one page. Students can use that to see all feedback I have given to specific strengths and weaknesses on all students writings.

And since they’re using anagrams instead of first-name usernames on their blogs, there’s less of a chance of any embarrassment resulting from this “public feedback”–with “invisible ink.”

The screenshot below is an example of what one student will see when she visits her blog with Diigo turned on.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. Screencast: Using Diigo on Student Scribe Blogs as Test Reveiw "Sheets"...
2. More on the Abuse of Student Blogs for Potential Young Writers...
3. Invitation to Explore Diigo "Groups": Social Annotation for the 1001...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.