I have to be honest and say that I didn’t see how wikis were going to help a kindergarten teacher. However, a few years ago our teachers were given the address of a wiki site for Common Core math games and information. I rarely visited it and found it to be a little confusing. I now have added the Common Core math and the language arts wikis to my wiki site. I hope using them for professional reasons will help me discover ways to at least use my site as a resource for parents and pass on some strategies to help with some of the kindergarten standards.
I visited the Counting Book wiki and loved the concept of having students create number with real and found objects. However, the images were not of a good quality and I think I would have put more effort into capturing the students work better. The Code Blue wiki site for a 6th grade science class was another one that gained my attention with intriguing titles. This one was very visual and it even piqued my interest in the human body. I enjoyed seeing links I was already familiar with, such as BrainPOP, this helped exploring a wiki less intimidating. Although, you can only see portions of the wiki The Great Debate, I felt the teacher did a great job creating and monitoring a site that his students could explore important issues of the 2008 election. He had the site locked allowing only his students to edit the pages. I found all of the wikis to be engaging and collaborative and they were a stark contrast to when I was a student keeping up with all of those handouts, carrying heavy text books and notes copied from a blackboard. Those were the days of working alone and you either got it or you didn’t. The continuous dialogue of wikis is so open and it allows all students to contribute to the lesson in a way that plays to their strengths. It also allows them to use their classmates as a resource.
References:
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.
I visited the Counting Book wiki and loved the concept of having students create number with real and found objects. However, the images were not of a good quality and I think I would have put more effort into capturing the students work better. The Code Blue wiki site for a 6th grade science class was another one that gained my attention with intriguing titles. This one was very visual and it even piqued my interest in the human body. I enjoyed seeing links I was already familiar with, such as BrainPOP, this helped exploring a wiki less intimidating. Although, you can only see portions of the wiki The Great Debate, I felt the teacher did a great job creating and monitoring a site that his students could explore important issues of the 2008 election. He had the site locked allowing only his students to edit the pages. I found all of the wikis to be engaging and collaborative and they were a stark contrast to when I was a student keeping up with all of those handouts, carrying heavy text books and notes copied from a blackboard. Those were the days of working alone and you either got it or you didn’t. The continuous dialogue of wikis is so open and it allows all students to contribute to the lesson in a way that plays to their strengths. It also allows them to use their classmates as a resource.
References:
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.