Update on my Journey into Web 2.0

Over the past week and a half I have jumped into the web 2.0 world. More accurately I guess the new news is not my involvement, but rather the fact that I have pulled my students in as well. So how did it go? That very much depends on the day. On Tuesday of last week I brought one of my classes into one of the building's computer labs; our goals were to assure all students were members of both our Diigo group as well as our class wiki on wikispaces , continue the research process and begin to post information. On the first goal I was very successful, I was able to get all class members, even my technophobes, on and active. The students were able to start to see the value of using the collaborative research tools available through Diigo. I found myself fighting a unforeseen battle on the wiki front. The class I am working on with on this project is a group of second semester seniors, I thought they knew enough (could be mature enough) to handle knowing what was appropriate to post. I asked them all to simply experiment with the tool, putting up, editing and giving feedback..They quickly showed they were still little kids, placing inappropriate (even hurtful) material. We had a talk and I think they got the message, we will see. The good news from that day was that the technology seemed to work well, Diigo had added a new feature to their toolbar and I was able to work through the change within our school network. I was feeling pretty good about making this move in to the 21st century.
On Wednesday I planned to do essentially the same thing with my second Bio II class. This is class engaged more during the introductory session and I anticipated a great day. Well....that is not what happened, what had work perfectly 24 hours before no longer worked. Students were not able to down load the "diglet" tool bar and therefore not able to highlight and add sticky notes on the articles they were researching. I attempted through, email and phone, to contact our technology team and was unsuccessful (today four days later...I still have not heard back!!). We struggled through and were able to add bookmarks to share with the group, but were not able to fully take advantage of the tool. To say I was frustrated, is an understatement...but I have not given up! The students know how the tool can work and also know they can probably access their diigo account from home. I worry about asking kids to use only their home access, because although most have access at home not all do and I worry about the inequities of the haves vs the have nots.
We continued to work on the project during class on Thursday and Friday, both classes did a nice job planning what they wanted to use as an audience as well as a focus for their wikis. The overall theme for the work is global climate change, but I have left the choice of audience, focus and organization to the individual classes. My plan for tomorrow in both classes is to work on the rubric I will use to assess their work.