This week, you explored the concept of wikis and created a wiki for a specific purpose. What purpose did you have in mind when developing your wiki and have you started to implement your ideas yet?
Earlier this year I started working on putting the Pillow Elementary Teacher's Manual in a pbworks.com wiki. I liked that the wiki is searchable, so that if a teacher is looking for the field trip form, they just have to search "field trip" and can get the necessary information. I started puting up information, but still need to get a lot of the documents from Mrs. King and have a long way to go. Slow and steady wins the race...
What advantages do you see in utilizing wikis?
The idea later expanded when I was on the literacy night committee, because no one had the forms and fliers from the previous year. We needed a place that all the teachers could use to pass information on from year to year without losing a ton of information just because someone retired or had to resign. That's why I made like 5 different people administrators on the school wiki. I would hate for all that work to be lost just because of a freak accident.
What disadvantages do you see?
I'm still just setting up the wiki. Earlier this year I told the teachers about it, and a few were interested enough to check it out, but overall the response was "We need training on this thing!" Most of our teachers are digital imigrants. Mrs. King, our principal, wants me to get it as fleshed out and user friendly as possible before training everyone on it at the begnning of the 2011-2012 school year.
Think back to the digital natives reading. Do wikis have the potential for engaging them? Provide examples.
I would like to start up some wiki book clubs. This would be a great way to encourage students to read and to discuss what they think about what they're reading. Before starting student wikis, I would probably upgrade to the $99 a year version of pbworks.com that allows you to control who has what priveliges, page by page.
A wiki would also be a good way for our GT kiddos to communicate across the grade levels on their Panther Paws projects. This year they researched panthers (our school mascot), made scale dioramas of a panther habitat, and then made a life-size habitat in one of the hallways. In the students' research, they found that "panther" is more slang than scientific, and refers to black leopards or black jaguars. The project I would like for them to do next year is to hypothetically campaign for a new mascot, researching the new mascot, designing a T-shirt, and writing a persuasive letter to the editor explaining why their mascot should replace the panther. A wiki would help the students show off their work to the other students and hopefully raise the bar to challenge our highest level students.
If we had a computer in front of every student, physical classes could be made up of age peers, and online "classes" in wikis could be made up of academic peers. For example, if you have a student who is reading on a 4th grade level but in 2nd grade, perhaps they could try out the 3rd grade curriculum for a week or two, and if that's still not high level enough, then try the 4th grade curriculum. In a school such as mine with a high mobility rate, people jumping in and out of groups all the time would hopefully keep students from getting "stuck" the way traditional ability grouping did. One problem would be constantly training incoming students in wiki use.
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