Slowly but surely I’m getting my mind around these wonderful web 2.0 apps… This week I began my adventures into the world of wikis. As if I wasn’t already inspired enough by Will Richardson’s book, Jeff over at The Thinking Stick has really opened my eyes to the possibilities of wikis with his TeenTek project. So, I decided to take the plunge and start with my study skills class:

My first class wiki

We started a class wiki to document what we have learned this quarter. I was so excited to tell them about the project that I actually had goosebumps! How amazing is it that we can all share together what we have learned in a dynamic format that requires no special skills or software?! And that we can share that with anyone in the whole world. Hard to believe that it’s so easy…

As soon as I showed the class how it works they were bouncing out of their seats to get started. I always like to see what they really think by having them close their eyes and take a quick poll of the class. This time I asked “Who is just as excited as I am to start this wiki?” 9 out of 12 raised their hands and were literally jumping in their seats. The last three raised their hands to “Who’s excited to start this wiki, but maybe not quite excited as me?” Talk about motivated. The kids are just as excited as I am whenever we start these types of projects.

Another side benefit of this wiki is that I can more accurately assess their collaboration and group work skills. We spent quite a while going over this collaboration rubric. We discussed what each level of each criteria means and I came up with some good examples to describe each one. By the time we were through I wondered if it was too much for them, that maybe I should just let them work on the wiki and not worry about assessing their group works skills. But, just to be sure I took the “eyes closed” poll. Every single student raised their hands when I asked “Who would like me to use this rubric to determine how well you work in a group so that I can tell you?” Works for me!

After taking a look at the rubrics and the basic introduction to wikis, we decided as a class that we would work in small groups to finish this project. The goal is to put everything we’ve learned this quarter on the wiki so that grade 6 students around the world (or even within the school) can improve their own study skills. As of yet I haven’t shown them anything too technical. I’m curious to see what they figure out on their own. I am amazed at how much they have already accomplished and I can’t wait to see where they go from here…

My first professional wiki

A few days before we started the study skills wiki, I started developing a middle school IT integration wiki to help support our tech integration initiative. I am still in the process of testing out the tools and learning what works best, but I am just so amazed at how easy it is. I hope that the site becomes a real, working resource for our teachers at the middle school level.

After looking around at a few others, like this one and this one, I realize that I need to add more text, more descriptions of what each resources is about and how it can be used in the classroom. I also realize that I need to add more concrete descriptions of why we should be using these tools in our classrooms. I had a very eye-opening day this week when I realized that many of our teachers still don’t understand the benefits of technology or the reasons that we would even bother to teach these skills in the first place. I think reading all of these amazing blogs has lulled me into a false sense of reality where everyone acknowledges the validity of of these tools. I forget that my real world (as opposed to my virtual one) is a few years (at least) behind. I’ll just have to work that much harder to get them up to speed…