Week #7 Thing#17

I added something to the "Sandbox" and found it incredibly easy. PBWiki seems like a great program.

I've just entered the world of wikis with my 5th and 6th grade students so it was great to go to the California Curriculum Connections Wiki. I explored several of the wiki sites and especially like Joyce Valenza's wiki. It had some great ideas and tons of resources. It's almost overwhelming!

Our wiki (which we made on WikiSpaces) is called (for now) Random Research and Wacky Facts. To start with I had the sixth graders collaborate on the home page--picking the picture and writing the purpose of our wiki and the definition of a wiki. Then I had each student create a wiki page of their own. On this page they posted about tornadoes--a note taking project we had done several weeks ago. They had to be able to read their notes, turn it into a paragraph with correct spelling and punctuation and add a picture.

To give them the idea of collaboration, we made a page called Wacky Facts. Anyone can contribute to this page as long as they follow the protocol. They need to cite their fact and to use correct spelling and punctuation and sign with their initials.

My goal was to introduce them to the idea of a wiki but now that we've done that I can see how we could make several wikis. One that would be interesting is to doing a history of our school. It started in the late 1800's and I have some incredible old documents and photos I found in a box in the corner of an old paper room (!). Another idea I had was to do biographies of each teacher and have the students interview the teacher (using a template of questions) and post these on a wiki.

The skill of collaboration will, I think, be an important one for them in their adult working lives and even though the programs might change (and probably will) they should understand what it is to work in a group and collaborate on the Web.