After reading Vicki Davis' Wiki Wiki Teaching blog post, I would love to start a wiki for the students that I work with. Vicki's experience with Wiki's was, in my opinion, ideal. I could only hope that the students and teachers that I work with would be that excited. To be able to get students that excited about the subject matter like she was able to do is truly extraordinary.
The first educational wiki that I explored was Code Blue. In this wiki, 6th grade students opened up a "clinic" to help learn about and explore body systems. The 5th grade students that I work with just finished up working with the body and would have loved to explored this site. I loved the links on the home page that allowed the students to explore great diagrams about the body and public health issues such as alcohol and smoking. I did not like how the wiki was organized and found it to be very confusing. The links to pages within the wiki on the left hand side should have contained a little more information about what was actually on the page. It was hard to distinguished which were the "doctor" biographies and which pages were "patient" information.
The second wiki was Discovery Utopias. The middle school students were given the opportunity to create their own utopia using information that they discussed in class and guidelines found on the wiki site. I love that the students were given the freedom to express their views, and view the opinions of their fellow students, on this topic by posting their projects on a wiki. One of my favorite parts of the wiki was when the students were allowed to post their views and argue whether they were for or against having a rubric. I thought that was awesome and the reasons that the students listed were pretty good. I don't think that I could have made the wiki any better because it was pretty amazing. The students utopias were very well done and nicely presented on the wiki itself. I think that the students really enjoyed this projectand their hard work definitely showed in the quality of their projects.
The final wiki that I explored was FHS Wolves Den. I was blown away by this wiki. What a great resource it must have been for all the students that were involved in the participating classes. One thing that initially popped in my head when I was viewing this wiki was that a student would never fall behind if they were absent. If a student lost an agenda or their notes from a class, to have that information right at their fingertips is totally amazing. From a parents perspective, it would be really amazing to know what your child is doing at school and what the projects/guidelines for a paper are would be really cool. I thought the organization of this week was nicely done and well thought out.
While exploring all of the wikis for this assignment, I kept thinking about what great assets these would be for students. I'm sure that it is very never racking to get them started if you are not comfortable with the technology, but the long term payoff (and the benefits they are to the students) is well worth it. I have thought about becoming a high school math teacher and I would love to be able to use a wiki in my classroom. From simple information, homework assignments, projects, to extra help on the discussion boards, there are endless ways to take advantage of a wiki.
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