Thing #16 Wiki

Last year, three of my teammates created Wikis for their classrooms. I saw the excitement that it generated with their students, but I didn’t really see how the students were getting very much out of it. One wiki had links to a bunch of different webcams, and the kids liked watching the animals that were featured. When I browsed through what they posted about, the spelling was terrible (okay, it’s 2nd grade, I know!), but they also weren’t really generating much information that I could tell. Now I realize that I was being a bit short-sighted. Seeing as how our classrooms are evolving into 2.0 classrooms, it was like baby steps for both teachers and students. The students were learning what it was like to be part of a collaborative learning community. Just like I wouldn’t expect a kinder student to walk in with perfect handwriting, so goes the Wiki. This year I have my own class Wiki going, and it is a learning process. I learned that I needed to teach the students to make relevant topics to post about, and I have had a few students start their own topics. There are pages created to go with things happening in our classroom, such as a page about science, and I add pictures of them learning, projects they do, and links (mostly to teachertube) to further their knowledge. They are learning how to be meaningful in their posts, and they enjoy checking it to see what new things I keep adding as we go along. I do have a love/hate relationship with this particular Wiki, maybe it’s the site that I am building from, but I have a heck of a time making a table on a page and making my text come out the way I want it to when I click “save”. I enjoyed the video from PB Wiki Tips---I have a slideshow made from when my class did air experiments, and now I think I know how to go about posting it.

The latest page that my students suggested was a Favorite Authors page, and we post links to author pages, such as Jeff Kinney and Tomie DePaola. Anytime something unusual happens, they want it posted on our wiki. It’s becoming an electronic scrapbook of sorts!