Lately I’ve been lamenting the challenges of getting teachers to hop on the web 2.0 bandwagon, but I really should be focusing on the infinite enthusiasm of my students to experiment with each and every thing I’ve shown them. I’m especially impressed with one of my sixth grade students, Lilian, who has really embraced these skills wholeheartedly. Her blog is always thoughtful and thorough and often includes personal anecdotes or information she thinks her classmates would find useful in addition to her academic work, and, as a blogger, she posts insightful, helpful, and clever comments on the other student’s blogs all the time.

In addition her fantastic blogging work, she even made herself a wiki about school (before I taught her how to do it) just for fun! The best part about it is that she learned about wikis from reading the blogs of my study skills students when they were making their class wiki!

On the “about” page, Lilian explains why she created her wiki:

“I created this wiki for my own learning but also for learning the different technology skills. I never even heard of wikispaces untill I was looking on Ms. C’s study skills students’ blogs’ which had reflections of making a wiki. After that I started exploring the MSstudyskills wiki, even before we started IT. I made my own wiki but didn’t know the basic skills. I now made a new one, for teachers to see my work and friends/family to also see my work online.

I created this so if I have for example, a math project, I can post it on here and present my work in this, rather than just using normal technology skills in Word or Powerpoint. I think in my home country I would have learned all of the blogging things neither wiki’s or using iMovie. I think I’m very lucky being able to “know” the world of technology.

I also made this for fun and for my writing skills and improving my own learning.”

This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for when this school year began!