Mr Clare’s Blog

Right. I am determined to make sense of all these problems floating around in my head. Wikis have depressed me for far too long. It can’t be that hard! Firstly, I will read up on some educational wiki materials.

Here’s an article I found at Wikiineducation.com. I can automatically figure out how I may use such a tool in class, but it’s nice to see all the options listed for you in one page. In summary, they are…

1. Easy to use (word processing format) and ready to use (built into the browser)
2. Easy to submit work to the teacher (you can check their work online at home)
3. Students can review and revise their own and others work anytime
4. Group work can be collaborated and built upon
5. Teachers can see the evolution of the information (time-stamping and authoring)
6. Authoring allows teachers to see how much each member of the group has contributed

So some examples are in order I feel! Here are some educational wikis I found on my travels…

1. Course Advisor Wiki from Brown University. You select the course subjects from the “Course Index”. For example in ”The Craft of Teaching” overview, people can write what the course entails, how difficult it is, who might be interested in it, and amusingly some quotes from the lecturer. Eek, having this at school would scare me a bit! Looking at the history of the page, not much collaboration has transpired, but you can imagine what it may look like. If you go back to the homepage, you can see the discussions tab (like the BBS of old!) and this could prove an awesome tool for students (maybe even older to younger students) answering their own questions.
2. The Chauncy School is for class resources, quizzes and notes. Go to the slide bar option and you can see it’s well laid out in topic areas. Each unit contains marking criteria, links, samples of work, checklists and unit information. A very comprehensive and slick site, I like it! (I did notice some files missing, though this is not hard to fix up as the design and content are already sorted)
3. Room 15 Wiki A wiki setup for students to post research projects, respond to questions, link research articles and upload pictures. If you go to the “slidebar” on the right you can navigate through a few pages. If you go down to the bottom you, click the link “Show all pages” under “Wiki Information” You can see some student pages, though brief and rarely updated you can see a list of ideas that you could use for student work.
4. Professor Nana is used to share class notes, post questions and build on each other’s work. This site is messy and hard to follow. It worries me to see on the “Questions for Terri” page there are numerous comments about missing information!

Another question that has plagued me is, “Can two students (or more) edit the one page simultaneously?”. Well it seems not. I found this discussion at PBWiki.com that explains some work-arounds teachers have used (see discussions on post). I like the idea of writing the pages on the whiteboard, when a student has finished editing a page they erased the tick next to that page and tick another page. This allows students to see what is available and if they have a checklist of pages they could see what they have done and (hopefully) get through all the page edits. If there was a page or two left to go, they could write their name next to the page on the board so they had priority when the page comes available again. Otherwise they could continue editing some other pages. As these pages may have naturally evolved since they last edited them they will be able to tweak them. Alternatively, they could have 10 minutes on a pages then alternate clockwise around the room. This option alleviates locking problems to a degree and minimises teacher board-work so they can circulate around the room.

Well I hope you found that helpful. Some great ideas. I do look forward to implementing this in my classes next term. If you have any comments, please feel free to add them!