I am really starting to get the hang of this whole wiki thing this week. Yes, last week I posted a link to the page on my wiki where I try to convince all teachers that we need to embrace new technologies, but I didn’t really understand how much this technology would change my teaching and learning. But, now it’s starting to clear up:

I spent most of today working on my Middle School IT Integration wiki for my students. I teach 9-week exploratory classes for grades 6-8 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The sessions are so short that we don’t often get to more than one or two major projects following the MYP technology design cycle (which I started using when I was teaching in Munich, Germany). But today, as I was working on this wiki for the students, I realized that the tools are actually so simple that I could incorporate a collaborative aspect to my courses just by letting them post what they learn on the wiki. Nothing so in-depth as Jeff’s amazing TeenTek project over in Shanghai, but a little something to pique their curiosity about this new tool.

After being away for a lovely long weekend on the Malaysian island of Redang,

beach.JPG

I came back to my RSS aggregator full of amazing wikis (that I will, of course, dutifly post on my page about wikis for the staff at school). Here are some of the really amazing ones:

Educational Technology that Works Wiki

Classroom Blogging Wiki from Tom Barrett

Classroom Google Earth Wiki also from Tom Barrett

One Laptop Per Child Wiki

Teaching with Technology Wiki

And, of course, the wiki for the K12 Online Conference

This got me thinking about something else… I remembered reading Vicki Davis’ post a few weeks ago about the effect that Wikipedia will have on textbooks given the rapid pace of technological and scientific change we are experiencing. I remember thinking that was a very interesting idea. And really, how can textbook authors, editors, publishers and manufacturers keep up with these developments? And today, I found David Warlick’s 2 Cents and Christopher Craft’s post about the same topic which reminded me of the original post. And then I remembered something else interesting:

Many of you may not know, but we in Malaysia (and Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia) experience something called “the haze” annually (during the dry season) due to slash and burn agriculture on Sumatra.

I was curious to find out more about this year’s haze, since it wasn’t quite as bad as last year, but was still prompting us to turn on the aircon rather than have the doors open in our condo. I did a search on Google and found only articles related to the 2005 State of Emergency that was declared here in Malaysia. Nothing on 2006. Interesting. I then did the same search including the date and look what came up as the first article in my search (at the time). Wow! CNN and BBC haven’t posted a thing, but Wikipedia had detailed reports by date and time for everything about this year’s haze almost up to the minute.

I shared that story with my sixth grade study skills class on Tuesday and they got it right away: textbooks are great for historical references, but not even scientific “fact”, and certainly not current events. They were really excited because we had just finished making our own class wiki and this really helped them see the relevance of the project. In fact, several of them commented on their blogs about how they could use a wiki in their other classes. If only the other teachers were as excited about this as they are…

Haze image citation:
Beawiharta “Haze brings misery, health problems in Indonesia.” Reuters.co.uk. Fri 6 Oct 2006 12:09:34 BST.

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