Thing #14

I must start out by saying that Vicki Davis' Wiki Wiki Teaching post got me pretty excited! How many times have I heard in my teaching career that it's all about making students responsible for their own learning. We must make it relevant and exciting for them. This teacher gave students ownership and they ran with it! And she didn't do it with paper and pencil tasks (yes, I know, my soapbox again)!

When I think of a wiki the first thing that comes to mind is collaboration. Some of the wiki examples could have just been webpages. The Holocaust Wiki Project was a real disappointment for me. I was looking forward to seeing some great student work about this topic. Instead, I found a site that was only a place for the teacher to post the assignment. This was a high school AP class, too! How frustrating that their best and brightest were not given the opportunity to really make use of this 21st century tool!

Another wiki I saw was the Kindergarten Counting Book. Each of the numbers had a picture posted next to it with the same number of objects in the picture. It's really hard to say if there was any collaboration - I'm hoping the students were at least able to take the pictures and help the teacher upload them to the wiki. I didn't see any responses (yes, kindergarteners can respond) and I only saw editing done by the teacher.

I did like the Schools in the Past wiki. This was done by a 1st grade class and students interviewed parents and grandparents about their school experience. The adults were then asked to post their answers online under the correct section. This was obviously done by multiple people because of the different writing styles (some had no capitalization) and grammar. So, even though the students did not do the actual typing, they participated by asking the questions and being part of the collaboration process. What a great way to get started! That teacher could then build from there and eventually get those students to log on themselves and respond to questions! Students are capable of doing just about anything we expect them to be able to do! And they're usually a lot better at catching on to technology than we are!