Thing 7 - Wiki Wiki What?

Being completely honest, Wiki’s may not be in my near future.  I have done lots of wiki research and I am still slightly confused.  I understand the benefits of wikis.  I love the collaboration part of wiki.  However, 1^st, they are not aesthetically pleasing to me (I am sure I can change this but the ones I looked at were grey and more grey); 2^nd, a lot of the wikis were hard to navigate and it took a lot of guess/click to find anything to look at it; and 3^rd, I am still unsure on how to assess them, but I guess that will come with using them.  

I looked at one wiki (Mr. Lindsay) where it was mostly used as classroom website.  It was well organized, but the wiki part was limited to professional development.  He had a wiki page where he has a q and a session for educators that is available to anyone to ask/answer.  It was interesting, but did not make me jump for joy to use wikis with my kids.  I am not sure if he uses his wiki with his kids, but he did get me thinking about wikis outside of my students.   It did make me realize that I do like wikis for professional purposes.  It seems like a great way to share resources and ideas between teachers.  I know that my amazing grad school/co-worker buddy Andrea and I have talked about suggesting a wiki to our technology specialist instead of her sending out all the emails that link to resources she has found.  She should build a wiki and that way the teachers can also add their 2-cents. 

I did find some really cool wikis that started my brain wheels a-turnin’ and I will probably attempt a wiki at some point, but they are not high on my list of new toys to play with.  I found Schools Then interesting. It was very simple and user friendly since there were not many pages or extra stuff associated with it.  It is just the main page.  I liked the use of a wiki as an interview tool.  It is friendly for all ages and could be used for many purposes. The people that have participated with the wiki have left valuable information that I can only assume has helped the first graders get a big picture of how school was through the years.  I can see my students setting up wikis asking questions to experts that are not normally available to them.  They could find people in the work force to help them learn science and maybe expand the science standards past what I am capable of. 

I really enjoyed Great Debate of 2008!  It was well-organized, amazing content, and clearly showed what the students needed to do.  The wiki showed some amazing work and I would have loved to have participated (even though I am not a student and it was for the 2008 Presidential Election).  This wiki also took measures to protect the wiki by only allowing edits by those who were approved to participate.  This wiki made me really start thinking about how wikis can be used in my class and I came up with an idea (light bulb!).  My advance Physical Science classes did energy debates last year (they were not that great though, but I tried something new and am ready to try again with changes!) and a wiki could be a good place to hold them this year (maybe with all my students…even though my on-level students have problems accessing the Internet unlike my advance students).   A wiki would allow for some great collaboration with the students, even outside of their class period.  I would want to use a similar format like Great Debate of 2008, but on a much smaller scale.  Now…I must produce!  So I guess wikis are in my near future.   Hopefully.  We are currently in the Energy unit now, so this will need to be created quickly (or just done next year...)!