Since I am familiar with wikis I already knew quite a bit about them. By reading Richardson’s article I learned more interesting facts and found some more uses for them in education. As you are aware “wiki” means short or quick in Hawaiian. Which is what wikis are all about. Wikipedia is one of my favourite places to find information and I know my students use it regularly. I frequently use it myself, but am unsure of the accuracy and lately I have been wondering if everything is true in this site. I don’t think that students know that anyone can edit anything on Wikipedia. Richardson however commented that ”there are vastly more editors who want to make it right then who want make it wrong.”(p.56) This reassures me that at least someone is monitoring the sites and the false information being added is removed quickly. Richardson says that Wikipedia is becoming a trusted and cited source. However, I still wouldn’t use Wikipedia as my only source in an assignment. I would say to students that it is a good starting point for research which would give a basic understanding of a topic and supply further links to more detailed information.
One of my favourite uses for wikis is for sharing and collaborating information. This idea has not caught on in my school at the moment but I think that with a little demonstration, teachers would love it. I have collaborated on an assignment for a course this term and it was very convenient for displaying information and discussing ideas. You didn’t have to email files back and forth and you could edit the other person’s text on the spot.
I was at a T-L inservice last month where a school did a collaborative wiki for the Oil and Gas Industry week. Students researched information and made their own wiki pages. The technology teacher put it all together and now they have an excellent resource that can be shared with the school community and the whole world. http://skh-careers-oilandgas.wikispaces.com/ This kind of wiki could be done in any school. Now that I have become more confident in creating my own wikis, I am going to promote this activity with teachers in my school and I can’t wait to do it in my own class.
I would recommend Joyce Valenza’s wiki page for school librarians and educators in general. http://informationfluency.wikispaces.com/21st+Century+Librarians. This is an excellent resource about reading, collection development, new technology, professional development, teaching and learning and so much more.
I had a look at some of the wikis that Richardson suggested.
http://k12wiki.wikispaces.com Vicki Davis presents an excellent wiki to show all the uses of wikis in the classrooms.
http:/pbwiki.com is more suited towards businesses that want to collaborate.
Westwood.wikispaces.com was old and not in use at the present.
http://www.seedwiki.com- I didn’t really understand what this was all about. All I got when I searched for this was a one page explanation.
http://www.schtuff.com looks like a photography site which I am not really interested in at the moment and wikicities.com doesn’t work anymore.
Two wikis that I will definitely be using in my classrooms are: wikibooks http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page and wikijunior. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior Richardson suggests that you could have students create or add entries to Wikibooks, then keep track of how someone else edits them on the site. With Wikijunior the editors are looking for students’ contributions to the full-colour booklets for children ages eight to eleven. (p.63)
As online tools and internet accessible text becomes more available to the world one may wonder what will happen to print material and textbooks on paper. Do we do away with books in the library and simply rent out e-readers? This is something for me to ponder for the Vision of the Future Project.
No comments:
Post a Comment