Learning about the use of wiki sites helped spark my interest on this great tool for teachers. I feel that I can use a wiki website with my history classes in different ways. The wiki website in my classes can be useful because the students will be able to communicate with one another while doing group projects that I give them. I teach U.S. History, African American Studies, and Women Studies, and these classes are mainly based around group projects and comprehensive exams. I could also use a wiki website to allow students to create and update study guides for the exams. This interactive study guide helps to create interactive learning and fellowship between the students. This allows for the more “shy” students to become more interactive in class activities.
Blogs and wikis differ in several ways. Wiki websites are websites where people can edit the information on the webpage. I think of a virtual whiteboard when thinking of a wiki website. This comparison draws from the ability to be able to change the information presented on the website easily and effectively. The wiki websites will allow students to create documents and interactively edit and present new information in one central place. Wikipedia is a wiki website that I am most familiar with from the Google search engine. A blog’s main purpose is for people to give their ideas and opinions on things in a forum type setting. Teachers will mainly use blogs to post information and to give announcements to their students. The main thing that I learned about a wiki website is that my students can use a wiki website in order to create their group projects and class study guides. Wiki is a great tool to get students to actively participate within the class. Learning about the wiki websites in a class setting was very interesting and helpful. I want to learn more ideas on how to implicate a wiki website in my history classes. The use of a wiki website is something that can be innovating and exciting in the classroom.
I agree that in Social Studies classrooms wikispaces create an ideal way to collaborate. I plan to also use the wikispace for service learning opportunities. Although many students prefer social meda, as teachers we can use wikispace to model online collaboration. As students also become used to sharing publicly in a more academic venue, they can also become better communicators. I need to update the rules on my wikispace, as we read for this assignment; that is one aspect I neglected to include on the wiki I created during this school year. I also like the idea of creating a new "textbook" for a course on a wikispace.
ReplyDeleteI believe that your observation about shy students being more willing to participate in group projects via a wiki as opposed to face-to-face is very astute. I had not considered this idea prior. This is one more reason why I feel that a wiki would be beneficial to my classroom. I can see how this could serve to both differentiate the lessons and accommodate students.
ReplyDeleteI think that Social Studies/U. S. History is one of the best ares for the use of wiki's. I found the list of wiki uses on this website http://legacy.teachersfirst.com/content/wiki/
ReplyDeletevery helpful. I hope that you can get a few ideas there.