Gary and Sally

At the minute I am in the middle of having my Year 8 students create a wiki based on a book we have read. It is Holes by Louis Sachar, and I set up a wiki to have the students post the work they have done on it, all the content posted is by them, and they also had to check and make comments about the pages.

Here I am going to post some of the mistakes I made, and what I would do differently from the beginning, as well as strategies used to deal with some of the problems that have arisen.

First of all I would run a session in the IT suite and get all the kids signed up at school as it took me a week or two of badgering to get the students to sign in. Eventually I had to get the last few stragglers to sign up on my computer in the classroom.

Secondly, I would draw up a list of rules for behaviour on the wiki (link here) In fact during the time we were working on it, we developed these rules. We had one or two episodes where people changed or deleted work (in a non malicious, helpful way) done by other people and the original poster got upset. So I assigned two people to be in charge of each page and only they were allowed to make changes. Anyone else could either post a message or a note on the discussions suggesting changes, but the physical changes were to be done by the people in charge of that page. If you look at some of the discussions they are quite interesting. This limitation to edit only certain pages may seem to be against the nature of a wiki, but it worked for us, at the stage we are at now.

Thirdly as the wiki is so massive, potentially, I find it is a good idea to assign responsibility for a page to one or two students as this gives them more ownership.

Possible problems :

Some students complain of inability to access the internet, the site, etc – then you need to have strategies for dealing with these students. If they are technically capable on computers, they could design their own buttons and banners for the website as this does not need access to the internet. If a student is artistic they can draw some characters from the book, landscapes etc, and these can then be scanned and incorporated into the wiki. Two students are also looking at creating a short podcast – they have drafted what they will say and are going to record that soon.

Another potential problem is students messaging each other and causing problems. I had one student who kept receiving messages for him to change something and he came to me upset as he was being bombarded with messages.

Suggestions :

• Run an IT session about wikis at the start.
• Set a timeframe – I told my class we had 5 weeks and then it was to become a static website and they have been removed as members.

Positive things :

Most of the students worked exceptionally well on the wiki, showing a lot of responsibility. They even got to the stage that they did not want to have flashy animations (similar to piczo). A few of them have crept in , but they liked them as they are not just flashy for the sake of it, rather the have a reason to be there, and serve a purpose. This meant, for me, that the students were enjoying the clean uncluttered, nature of the wiki which focuses on the content rather than the candy floss, bells and whistles of piczo.

conclusion:

Creating this wiki has been a real eye opener for both myself and the students – it was very simple to do and half of the class were very actively involved. I have got plans to create others with students – maybe at the start of year and develop it over the academic year instead of just a few weeks.

Several students have even created their own wikis and shown them to me – links can be found on the here and here. I will keep an eye on those to see how they develop. For the travel one, I have asked some ex-colleagues in other countries to get their students to post information about their country so that this one becomes more international.

It has been an amazing exercise and I would recommend to any teacher that you try it with your students, after a few lessons they will be helping you! That is not a bad thing, you can learn together.

Filed by garyandsally at 5:37 am under Uncategorized
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