ONLINE ANNOTATION AND RESEARCH 1

Online Annotation and Research Using Diigo and Scrible

Kate Chambers and Amber Harper

ECI 546

North Carolina State University

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Whether students like it or not, research will forever be a part of academic life. Many

students struggle with the motivation to gather information from multiple sources and then

paraphrase or summarize that information in a way that guards them against plagiarism and

allows them to synthesize ideas to make them their own. Research becomes a chore that students

dread when it could be a treasure hunt for meaningful information. The older students get, the

less motivated they are to complete reading and writing assignments, and this motivation is

further diminished for many students who have trouble with reading. We wondered how our

TPACK could impact our students ability and motivation to research and asked the following

compelling question: How can technology support our students with research skills necessary to

write informational text, and what tech tools will be most effective for our students?

Background

Kates Literacy Connections Classroom (seventh grade resource language arts)

Kates seventh grade students are beginning a new unit called Extraordinary in the

Ordinary, which focuses on the essential questions, In the face of adversity, what causes some

individuals to fail while others prevail? and What makes an experience extraordinary? They

are working on a project centered around close reading, research, and argumentative writing. As

a class, they previewed videos about the CNN heroes for this year, ten remarkable people who

are doing extraordinary things to help the world. Students took brief notes during the videos to

help them remember and they had great discussions about what makes each person

extraordinary, working on summarizing skills. Then the students chose three of the heroes to

research further, helping them to decide on one hero to choose as hero of the year and to guide

their research to prepare for an argumentative piece on this topic. They have been working on

close reading this year, and they have grown very independent with it, but sometimes arent very
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motivated to do their best work. Thus, Kate chose Scrible as a tech tool to allow them to annotate

articles online, hopefully increasing their motivation while also expanding their research and

digital literacy skills.

Ambers Fifth Grade English-Language Arts and Social Studies Class

Ambers fifth graders are just beginning to learn the importance of annotation as they

research to write informational text. In their current unit of study - The Road to Revolution -

students have been digging into the events of the late 18th century in American history,

discovering the tensions that built and led the American colonists to rebel against British rule.

Now, they are preparing to write informational essays about the events that led to the

Revolutionary War by integrating several texts that theyve read on the subject. Students

practiced annotating books about the American Revolution in small groups by paraphrasing and

summarizing key ideas on sticky notes; however, they struggle to take information from a screen

and transpose it to paper. To help them capture the key details from digital texts, Amber will be

modeling the Diigo text annotation tool and guiding students to use this Google extension when

reading texts online.

Lesson Rationale

We understand that students must learn to read text closely and annotate that text to

determine important ideas that will be useful in their research-based writing assignments. It is

also clear that students are more motivated when given the opportunity to work with technology.

Online text annotation tools like Scrible and Diigo provide the perfect opportunity for students to

capture the significant details from a digital text and make their own personal notes about those

details. This gives students a chance to define unfamiliar terms and to summarize or paraphrase

information found online to use that information in their own writing. In 2012 Jingyan Lu and
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Liping Deng published a study on active reading using Diigo to annotate text online. They found

that not only does reading comprehension improve when students highlight and take notes about

what theyre reading, but also written products improve.

Since our students will be using these tech tools primarily to annotate text online, this fits

into the Revised Blooms Taxonomy at the remembering and understanding levels. These are

foundational skills: students must be able to remember and understand what they read before

they can analyze and evaluate text and later create their final product. Lu and Deng (2012) argue

that identifying and understanding relevant concepts and issues are prerequisites of any inquiry,

and are supported by Diigos highlighting and sticky notes features. These same features are

also components of the Scrible web app.

One theory that guided our thinking during the planning and implementation of our

lessons was the theory of metacognition. The importance of teaching metacognition to our

students was described in a 2010 Preventing School Failure article,Metacognition Needed:

Teaching Middle and High School Students to Develop Strategic Learning Skills, by Nancy

Joseph, an English professor at Oakland University. In this article, Joseph explains that it is so

critical for teachers to make time for teaching learning strategies so our students can be

independent learners, What is more important than spending time teaching the critical thinking

skills needed for independent learning? Encouraging students to practice reflective thinking does

not add extra content; rather, it is a tool for mastering existing content. Many teachers have

discovered that strategies for developing metacognitive skills can be embedded into traditional

learning activities (2010). Students who are self-aware learners are the students who are willing

to take on new and challenging tasks, to honestly reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, and

to take chances with their creativity. These are the students we need to be tomorrows leaders,
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but many of our students wont become these leaders unless we directly teach and encourage

metacognition. With this project, we are asking our students to reflect on their actions and

learning before, during, and after the project. They are also using metacognitive skills as they

closely read materials to pull out important information and think how it could be used to support

their own writing.

Lesson Implementation

Extraordinary in the Ordinary is a seventh grade Language Arts unit combining close-

reading, research, and argumentative writing with the theme of ordinary people who do

extraordinary things. Kates seventh grade students are familiar with close-reading strategies and

using annotation to help them understand and remember what they read, but it is their first time

doing research to find information to build an argument. The majority of the students in this class

struggle with writing fluency, and annotating is often a slow, laborious process. Although

annotating with Scrible employs many of the same skills as traditional annotating, the students

were much more motivated to work on the computers and with the different options available on

Scrible (underline, highlight in different colors, leave notes, etc.) Kate modeled how to use

Scrible using the SmartBoard and engaged her students in a collaborative annotation of an

article, allowing them time to practice the tools and share ideas about how to take notes. Then

the students moved to their individual computers to use Scrible with their own articles and spent

several days highly-engaged in completing some excellent close-reading and research. This

research was a key component to prepare them for their argumentative writing piece.

The Road to Revolution is a fifth grade unit integrating English-language arts and

informational writing with social studies standards related to the American Revolution. After

spending a week in class discussing, modeling, and practicing how to summarize and paraphrase
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text and the importance of annotation in the process, Ambers fifth grade students were ready to

practice these skills independently. Amber used Google Classroom to link two kid-friendly

reputable websites for students to use in researching the causes of the American Revolution and

wanted to have the students use the Diigo Web Annotation Extension for Google Chrome to

annotate and bookmark the pages relevant to their individual research. Because the Diigo

Chrome extension takes several steps to install, Amber guided her students through the process

in small groups of five or six students. Once the extension was installed, students were highly

engaged and focused on reading the information on the websites carefully so that they could

annotate with their own paraphrase or summary of the text. Some students even included

questions in their annotations to remind themselves to look for more information in other sources

to enhance their research.

Reflection on Outcomes of Implementation

Challenges and Successes

For Ambers fifth graders, annotation really started to make sense once they were

motivated by the opportunity to work with technology. Because the Diigo annotation tool

allowed students to see the original text while making their own notes about the text on the same

computer screen, their paraphrases and summaries became more accurate and less likely to

plagiarize phrases from the text. This tech tool simplified the information-gathering process, as

one student commented, No more copy and paste! As a teacher, Amber loved seeing her

students independence grow. One group of students realized when logging onto the

Chromebooks for their second day of research that the Diigo Chrome extension had disappeared;

however, those students remembered how to reload the web extension from the previous days

lesson and immediately set to work downloading the extension and getting started again. They
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were so thankful to find that even though the extension disappeared, their work did not. Every

highlighted line and added note was safe and sound in each students Diigo Library. Some

students even came back to class after the first lesson exclaiming that they had downloaded the

Diigo extension on their own computers at home to keep working! Time was also a challenge

that Amber faced. Ultimately, this assignment is only the beginning of how she plans to use

Diigo with her students. Her next steps include having students share their annotations through

Diigo, comment on each others notes with suggestions on how to improve their paraphrase of

the original text or correct misconceptions about the text, and use classmates evaluation to

improve reading comprehension and annotation of online texts.

For Kates 7th graders, Scrible helped her students deeply engage with text like they had

never done before. There is nothing like the happy hum of a classroom where keyboards are

clicking and the only conversation is students leaning over to help each other navigate

technology or to spell a word! Kate was amazed at how quickly her students caught on to the

technology and even figured out little tricks to use it more effectively on their own. Two of her

quieter students blossomed as technology leaders during this project and were spontaneously

teaching the students around them throughout our research time. Most of the students were faster

at typing their ideas than writing, so the quality of annotations was much better than it has been

during more traditional close-reading work. Plus, the excitement of getting to use technology

made Kates students, who all have reading disabilities, more motivated to read and comprehend

very complex text. This project also connected with students because it was a perfect example of

real-world literacy. During a current events discussion, we talked about how many people rely on

the internet to get their news. One of Kates students connected back to Scrible and how you

could use it to collect articles youre interested in and to help you read them at home. We also
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discussed how reading is different online because there is often a lot of other content around

whatever you are trying to read, including links to other articles, videos, advertisements, etc. On

the other hand, we talked about how it is sometimes hard to focus on reading when you have

these distractions but that this is a part of being a reader on the internet. Luckily, it seemed to

Kate that her students were mostly able to ignore their distractions when given the option to

annotate using Scrible. Finally, Kates students were very engaged because they were annotating

real news articles about people who are important and making a difference in todays world.

Every Friday, we watch Flocabularys Week in Rap and use this as a discussion starter for the

the weeks most important current events. Kates students are so concerned about these adult

issues and they seemed to latch onto the opportunity to learn more about positive news in the

world. Kate plans to use her new knowledge of the benefits of online annotating with Scrible and

apply it to her other classes, including two other resource language arts classes and two in-class

resource classes (a mix of students with disabilities and without).

Collaboration

Although we teach different grade levels and our students were involved in different

assignments, collaboration on this project was still beneficial in many ways. Our conversations

in planning sharpened our teaching strategies and implementation ideas. We celebrated with our

students successes and gave each other suggestions for facing the challenges that inevitably

come with integrating technology. Working with a partner motivated both of us to put even more

effort into the assignment since our evaluation depends on our mutual effort. It is very clear that

the requirements of this project pushed us out of our comfort zone and made us more

accomplished educators. We were left wondering how digitally literate and accomplished our

students could be as researchers if we taught these skills across content-areas beginning in the
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early grades and reinforced them and expanded upon them in the upper grades. Therefore, we are

encouraged to share our video from this project with our respective classes, and show them how

both the 5th grade and 7th grade students flourished with these tech tools, and to take these ideas

and share them on a bigger-scale, back to our departments and committees at our schools.

Although making a video on Animoto was a brand-new idea for us and completely out of our

comfort zone, we enjoyed the process and feel comfortable using this technology again, as well

as teaching it to other educators. It also opened our eyes when we had to give and receive

feedback from our peers. Kate had a brief moment of frustration and then realization when our

peer reviewers commented that some of the student videos were difficult to hear and understand.

She wanted to defend her students, knowing that they are shy and were uncomfortable speaking

in front of the camera. One of her students has autism and struggles with expressive language, so

his statement is drawn out and takes longer than average. However, it ended up being a moment

for growth, as Kate realized that her peer reviewers were being honest and trying to help, so she

worked on adding text after some videos and finding a quieter background song. In all, we

greatly appreciated the challenge of this project and feel like we have become better teachers and

teacher leaders as a result of it.

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References

Lu, J., & Deng, L. (2012). Reading actively online: An exploratory investigation of online

annotation tools for inquiry learning. Canadian Journal Of Learning And Technology,

38(3), 16 pp.

Joseph, Nancy. (2010). Metacognition needed: Teaching middle and high school students to

develop strategic learning skills. Preventing School Failure, 54 (2), 5 pp.