Digg in the classroom??

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Permalink Reply by Marielle Lange on November 8, 2007 at 3:41am

I did install pligg to try it out. If persons want to see what is is, here is a working demo. Very easy to install. It's very simple to use and add news items. Same category tagging as you find in blogs. There is a voting system where news item can be rated by interest. Each item can be commented.

I don't teach in a classroom though. What do you have in mind? Keep track of websites and news of interest? Ask the kids to find websites that are related to a given theme and then decide of their relevance and quality? How well is the subject explained, are there any omissions or errors? I could be used as well to invite them to comment and vote on books they have read.

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Permalink Reply by Scott Walker on November 8, 2007 at 4:10am

Basically I would set it up like this. I would create a general category for each of the topics that will be covered in class over the year. I would probably even submit one or two articles for each, just to show the students how it is done. The goal would be to get students making connections to the things that they read and find. Students would get credit for finding new articles, and commenting on the content submitted by others.

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Permalink Reply by Rich White on November 8, 2007 at 4:33pm

We messed with it about a year or so ago ...... didn't get too many people in the group to add posts and rate them ..... seemed like we needed a much larger group (5K 10K people) to make it work.

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Permalink Reply by Scott Walker on November 8, 2007 at 6:53pm

Rich, was this in a classroom? Or some other group?

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Permalink Reply by Steve O'Connor on July 2, 2008 at 11:31am

I'm working with Pligg right now. I think it has enormous potential for schools.

For my school and community, I need to make several changes:

• Registration must be closed--that way only students of teachers can submit bookmarks.

• Upcoming Stories must be turned off, so that unapproved material is not visible.

• Comments must be turned off since they can't be moderated.

All these changes can be made by hacking template files. I've been making wild guesses and altering code to make these changes and have successfully turned off all these features. I broke the voting meanwhile, so I'll go back at it with a fresh install--this time with a better idea of what needs to be edited.

I am documenting my Pligg customization experiences on my blog.

If there is interest, I could modify a few templates and make them available for download so you wouldn't have to hack the code.

Steve

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