Above is a screen capture of my Wiki. Along with my initial positive and negative thoughts about it. You can view it at http://jessicaslearningjourney.wikispaces.com/My+New+Wiki or click here.
In the beginning....
My final thoughts....
Well where will I start about WIKI's. Should I state first that it took me over 2 hours to set up my account. I had to cancel the first attempt and go back in because it just wasn't working! After I finally got the wiki up and running Aly, one of my group assignment members, decided it would work well if we all posted our information/ ideas onto her wikispace. So she asked me to join her page! Well this didn't work so well for me either. Do you think I could work out how to accept her request? No! Every time I accepted it and went in to edit the wiki page it said I wasn't a member. Let's just say this wasn't a good day for technology! After taking a few deep breaths I was able to play around and request to join her wikispace myself. This finally worked!!
During the process....
So weeks of group sessions together both in person and at home alone were spent editing and uploading information to Aly's wiki. You can view this wiki here. I must admit even after my first encounter with the wiki I was still apprehensive. Then when my group decided they wanted to use it all the time I was just down right petrified. I couldn't stop thinking that all of our hard work might get deleted and end up somewhere in the big wide internet world and then we would have to start all over again. I also found that if multiple members where in the wiki editing at the same time, it would often play up. Once even deleting information that I had just saved.
My final thoughts....
Over the few weeks of using this wiki I have started to come around and think it was a good idea to use in collaborative learning context because we could easily add and delete things when we weren't together and it was a simple way to communicate between four people.
Now I am not saying at all that I like wiki's I'm just saying I might have come around a little and think they might ... yes might work in a classroom environment. As long as teachers set rules and boundaries as to what can be edited and instruct learners about the possibilities of deleting information permanently. I suppose on the other hand teachers could use it as a place to set home work or other information that doesn't need editing?? This could work!
Does anyone want to change my negative thoughts about wiki's? I am open for comments!
On another note...
After using both wiki's and blog's throughout this learning journey I think I would be more inclined to use blog's in my classroom environment and even in my own experiences as a lifelong learner. I do like how simple they are! I like that you can do lots of separate posts and this makes me feel more secure! I am not going to hit on wrong button and lose all my hard work... or the students hard work. I think a blog would be a great place to use as a profiling/ digital portfolio of the classrooms work. Parents could be given the blog address and they could look on and find what's been happening in the class to date, maybe like a virtual classroom??
After following Kelly's blog I found she had some very useful information about wiki's. I posted her a comment about her insights into wiki's. You can read it here.
Jess,
ReplyDeleteI had a different reaction to you! I thought that setting up and using the WIKI was quite easy. I think it could potentially be a great tool to use in classrooms to get students working collaboratively or providing information to parents. I would be apprehensive about using it in the younger grades but still think it could work. I have found that a lot of people did not like the WIKI's though.
Hello Jessica,
ReplyDeleteI also found the Wiki to be very complicated, and I imagine this would be worse once people start editing the page. I had a look at the Wiki for your assignment, and it looked like you girls used it regularly. Did you find that it was easier to post your work/ideas on the wiki for you assignment, instead of using E-mail?
Do you think a Wiki is possible in the younger years? Or would it be too complicated?
Hi Teagan,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad I wasn't the only one who found the Wiki complicated! Once we started to use the Wiki for our assignment I did find it was easier to communicate back and forth with the other group members. In the past I have used email communication for group work and I do think that way is harder. The Wiki was easy for people to post their ideas and everyone was able to see it at the same time in the same place instead of opening emails and looking for each others information.
I think you could still use the Wiki in the younger years, the only thing would be that you would have to set it up for the students and give them explicit teachings on how to use it. Also you would have to monitor what is edited on the page.
Did you see the link on my post about the website on Kelly's blog? It has some great ideas of how to incorporate Wiki's into the classroom environment. Make sure you have a look at it!
Hi Jessica,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip of how to use it in the early years. Some how I never realised that you can set up a Wiki (or plenty of other types of ICT tools) ready for the young learners to use.
This makes me think of what my current prac class are doing in the Computer Lab lesson. They are Preps, and are currently doing a unit on weather. The teachers have set up a program for them (I cannot remember the name), where the students put a photo and a word describing the days weather. These are avaiable to the children on the program, and they just need to choose the appropriate photo and word/s, then drag them onto the page. This is very scaffolded, but enables students to still have some choice. (That was a little off topic!)
I will definitly consider using a Wiki in any future group tasks, as the easy collaboration is quite appealing!
Teagan