This is a guest post from Rebecca Johnson.

Both Diigo and Jing
have been written about on numerous occasions here at the Free
Technology for Teachers blog, but I wanted to share my experiences using
both tools when grading assignments. I teach an information literacy
course for the college where I work as a librarian. This course requires
students to create an annotated bibliography as their final project;
but there’s one issue that I continually run into time and time again –
students would submit their sources throughout the quarter, but when it
came time to put the bibliography together, they never could find their
sources again which left them scrambling to search for additional
content. This past quarter, I tried something completely different, and
it worked beautifully!


Diigo:
Students
were required to create a Diigo account at the beginning of the
quarter, and when searching for books, journal articles, or scholarly
websites, they would save their sources using the diigolet tool
(a bookmarklet). As the image indicates, students were required to
provide me with an APA citation, and their summary annotation within the
description field of the bookmark area. When students were finished
searching for that week, they would submit their Diigo library URL to
me, which made it very easy to continue grading their work as they
advanced through the course.

Jing:
Once
students submitted their work to me through Diigo, I needed some way of
grading it visually so they would know exactly what mistakes were made
in order make the necessary changes and complete the final project. I’ve
used Jing in the past to create screencasts, but my number one use
is screen capturing. I mark-up student work and provide the screen
capture URL for them to view. The image indicates an example of what a
student missed in their Diigo library and how I marked it up using Jing. 

This
combination of grading has worked much better than I ever thought it
would, and as an added bonus I have even had students ask how to
download Jing for their own computers!
——-
Rebecca
Johnson teaches Information Literacy at Harrison College and is
transitioning into an Instruction and Emerging Technologies Librarian
position with Manchester University.  Follow her online at BeccaLovesBooks (Twitter @beccalovesbooks). 


Editor’s note: Jing Pro is scheduled to be shut down in February 2013. TechSmith (the producers of Jing) do offer other screen capture products. You can find a list of other screen capture tools here.