Don't hate me for saying so, but I think I might be sorry that the school year is at an end. I just read some great ideas for creating wikis with students and I wish we had time to try them now!
First, I should come clean and say that I have been skeptical about wikis. I can get excited about most new technologies, but I have been prejudiced against wikis. As an elementary school librarian, I work hard to teach kids about authorship and authority, to learn about their sources of information. Wikipedia gets under my skin. However, I do have some classroom teacher colleagues who are quite excited about wikis. So, I'm getting up to speed!
I just finished reading Classroom Blogging: A Teacher's Guide to the Blogosphere by David F. Warlick (Landmark Project 2005). On pages 68 - 70, Warlick lists some great ideas for using wikis with kids in schools. I hope it's okay to write about them here.
The first one that got me feeling enthusiastic after dinner is the "Classroom Dictionary." I immediately see applications for this with our current first and sixth graders. In both classes, vocabulary building is prominent. Warlick's idea is that students could post new vocabulary words as they come up, throughout the year. This has great application in my library classes (all grades) as well. New words come up constantly in read-alouds; if we could have a laptop at the ready, the day's chosen student could type in the word, the meaning, and the context in which we learned it. It would be a great tool for reminding children of words they've encountered. Parents, too, could look in and see (and maybe drop some of those words into conversation at home!).
I also really liked Warlick's "Story Starters." Our school regularly participates in a school-wide writing prompt. In "story starters," each student has his or her own page on which he or she begins writing in response to a prompting sentence. After a defined period of time, students switch pages, read one another's work, and continue telling a story from a classmate's beginning! I can see this working at many grade levels. I can also see this being very fun for kids.
If anyone reading has other great wiki ideas to share, please do!
4 comments:
Robin:
Thanks for the book recommendation! It sounds like a great resource to use in addition to Will Richardson's book.
Pam
I don't think you have to worry so much about Wikipedia, especially if you are trying to teach students about evaluating sources for authenticity, etc. Wikipedia is really the perfect tool for teaching and learning just that skill. In what other format are students able to learn to "fact check" for themselves, and then even have the opportunity to make public corrections and revisions? I've always had to teach my students not to read a history textbook as if it were the final answer; now, with things like Wikipedia, it is easier to teach students why it is important to be a little skeptical of their sources. Mistakes and especially omissions are made in both published book form as well as in Wikipedia, yet most educators take using published textbooks for granted. What message are we sending if we allow our students to use textbooks for "information" but not things like Wikipedia? We have to teach our students that all sources are open to error and omission. Why is Wikipedia any different?
I think Wikipedia is different because so many grown-ups are so excited about using it but are NOT looking at it with a critical eye. I am finding many who go to it for information and stop there.
When I do research projects with kids, I teach them to use multiple sources. We typically use encyclopedias (print & online), books, research databases, and web sites that we examine for authority. As a librarian, I don't have access to textbooks -- and I agree with you wholly that they shouldn't be used blindly as part of the research experience.
If a quirky fact shows up in only one source, we press on to find another, independent source of that fact. (Keep in mind, we're in elementary school here -- four to five sources on anything is plenty).
I am definitely looking to learn more about wikipedia & wikis in general. Any tool is only as good as how you choose to use it.
Here is one reason why I am frustrated with wikis:
Richardson's book pointed to Bud Hunt's wiki as an exemplar. I was looking forward to reading Hunt's "Blogging Policies and Resources Wiki." Someone has replaced his "Blog Policy Notes" with a list of links to prescription drugs.
Any time you post a link for children to use you run the risk of it being altered or taken down. (That's why monitoring the school website is an important job!) With wikis, it just happens so fast!
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