Wow! I never thought I'd have so much fun creating a wiki. Before this summer, I had only briefly heard about a Wiki from our technology guru. I had no idea what it was and the name alone intimidated me. I no longer feel this way. I am much more comfortable with this Web 2.0 tool and have no doubt about trying it out with my students in this upcoming year. I created the beginnings of a class wiki. I added pages for each of the subjects and some links to start. Take a look...
Room 118's Wikispace
The only thing that I am still trying to work out is how I'm going to set the wiki up for student responses to their reading. I'll take any suggestions!
From my experiences with both wikis and blogs, I think that the major differences are that blogs are like an online journal. They are written by one person who shares their thoughts and opinions on a consistent basis. A blog also allows for comments to the author, and the author can respond as well through their blog. Some blogs have specific topics. For example, some people blog their weightloss journeys. Others blog their pregnancies. You can find a blog for just about anything! Wiki's on the other hand, are sites where there is more than one author. Anyone(depending upon your settings) can edit, update, etc.
On a wiki, there are many contributors, thus many opinions, thoughts, comments, and/or resources shared. If you want to have a back and forth discussion with one person, then the blog is what you want to use. The reason why I say this is because if you are having a discussion on a wiki, your comment will go to the whole group and not necessarily to a specific person.
Magie,
ReplyDeleteYou can apply for an educator's account on Wikispaces. Then you can send them the names of your students en masse and they will create "private" log ins for the kids. That's what the organizers do for the Wiki Spice it Up a Notch. Great avenue for the kids responding to literature. Either one page for each literary element if they read the same book or a page for each book highlighting the literary elements. I have some leading questions for each element, if you'd like. Wow, the mind is continuing to spin.
Love the video! We have used the wikispaces free educator upgrade -- it's nice because it gets rid of the advertising. It is very easy to upload your entire class as Terri points out -- now you can manage it yourself, we used to have to wait for the wikispaces team to upload the info.--check it out.We have seen wikis for literature set up in many ways -- always though, a guiding question for students to begin with. It seems as if you will have a partner here to work with -- that's great!
ReplyDeleteGreat to see all of these wheels turning! It looks like you have a "made-to-order" partner in Terri, and as both Maureen and Terri said, wikispaces have made the setup for classes very easy to do - can't wait to see how excited your kids will be -- keep us posted!
ReplyDeleteJoan