Saturday, December 27, 2008

Wiki As Class Oragnizers

This year I decided that my technology based courses should be examples of what I encourage my staff and students to try. Here are links to my CPT 20 and IP 10 wikis.

These wikis were designed as constant work-in-progress sites.  I hope to update often an
d showcase a number of web 2.0 tools.  I also plan to showcase as much student digital work as possible.

My ultimate goal, is that students recieve feedback on their blogs, which would promote their pages of the wiki and more importantly, their work.  This feed back would teach them to; a) Take critism and continue to improve work, b) take comments with a grain of salt and c) never quit editing.

If you visit the wikis, please notice the student pages.  CPT have not began theirs but IP10 have links to their digital citizenship wikis.  These students would love feedback!!!  You can find them on our class blog under ELA 10A. 

Monday, December 8, 2008

My ELA 10 Macbeth Wiki

This is a wiki I developed last year.  It is used for our student scribe unit in which the students hold each other accountable for the note taking by taking turns.  Each day a new student is in charge of keeping notes on the days topic. I provide the basics that the students will need to understand the play, but the true insights are provided by the students themselves.

Some of the advantages of this type of study are:
  1. Students are able to focus on the play not note taking.
  2. Students get insights from each other.
  3. Students practice dictating self notes.
  4. Students learn to use a wiki.
  5. Students get to display podcast projects.
  6. Students provide each other with links to extra resources.
Some of the disadvantages are:
  1. Some students zone out and don't take advantage of the extra focus.
  2. If wiki is not accessed, notes are useless.
  3. If the Internet is down, as it has been a lot lately, cannot work on the wiki.
  4. Lack of effort in note taking hurts all students.
All in all, this has been a good project.  I believe that this unit works well for this since Old English is difficult for students to understand.  I look forward to this years students podcast being added next week.