I believe that wikis will be a great tool for allowing the students to gather different information as the year progresses that will then be available as both a review for the high stakes tests this year and years to come. For instance, I am considering implementing wikis as chapter reviews. I believe that if I create a wiki for the chapter and assign specific sections to each student, as a group they will be able to create a review before each unit assessment. These reviews will then be available for future years to begin with and build upon. Moreover, as I consider the high stakes tests that my students will have to take, I recognize that these reviews will be available as the tests approach.
Finally, similarly to the unit reviews, I believe that the wikis would be a wonderful tool for the project that I use to wrap up the year. The students create documents for each of the state standards. These documents include notes, pre-tests, exit tickets, and PowerPoints. By using a wiki, I would have a forum to collect this information and make it available for the students to access on their own without me hanging the notes or displaying the PowerPoint. It would allow students to collaborate on the information and access he information for reviews.
I am very excited about the prospects, but hesitant at the same time. I can see all of the great uses, but what happens when students interfere with other students work. By allowing the collaboration, I am also setting up a site that would allow students to incorrectly edit another student's work. How do I prevent these unauthorized edits? How do I maintain the integrity of the work?
Just think of all the paper you will save by doing wikis. You'll have to come up with other ideas for your bulletin board. We can even probably figure out a way for you to continue to do your timeline on the new netbooks. I can see you now --assigning a standard to a group of students and then they have to supply their own problems and answers to teach that standard to all of your students. Wonder if your Spanish speaking students would translate each wiki into Spanish for the beginning esol students? Just think of what can be done???
ReplyDeleteAnd, without all of the papers, I cannot lose anything! Plus, the room would be so much neater.
ReplyDeleteEditing each other's work is great and tricky at the same time. There are ways to recover missing work, but I find that most of the time students are so involved in their portion of the project that they do not mess with other work on purpose.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was reading about your project, I kept thinking that wikis could really expand the whole concept. What if students created videos about each of the standards? Wikis allow students to embed videos from a variety of sites.
I really like the idea of having students gather information that would build on their final assessment. Maybe they can also create a quiz and post it on the wiki and have students grade the responses in class or if possible create a form for the data to be collected in an excel spreadsheet.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of students being able to edit the work on the wiki concerns me too. The rules and expectations should be laid out prior to the students creating or contributing to a wiki. This should help to increase the students awareness of proper etiquette.