Thing #8: Wiki Wiki Wonderland

It takes a lot to inspire me. Generally, I'm unimpressed with heart-warming stories and tales of fabulous technological success. However, reading Vicki Davis's blog left me feeling oddly excited to get started on a Wiki for my kiddos this year. I really appreciated how she explained her step-by-step process to get the students up to speed, and I bookmarked it to use it later when lesson planning for the upcoming year. I think that I'll definitely try this out on my Yearbook staff. It seems like a good idea for them, though I'm not sure on the specifics quite yet.

For the three wikis that I chose to investigate, I tried to pick 3 different ones to focus on, kind of to give myself an overview of the different situations and possibilities. First, I took a glance at what I thought was a pretty comprehensive one. David Lindsay's classroom wiki seemed kind of a "catch-all" site at first. However, the longer I spent looking through it, the more I understood how it was organized. I loved the top menu for the most part, and I really enjoyed seeing how the students were able to post about news articles - I think that will be one of my "done early" activities this year if I start one for my ESL class, and maybe one of my weekly expectations for my Yearbook kids, to reflect on designs they've found/made. I would change the curriculum on the bottom of the page. I think that should just be a completely different tab.

Second, I looked into a much more focused site, the Discovery Utopia Project. I found this site endlessly interesting, mainly because of the content rather than the concept. But when I wasn't getting wrapped up in the students' imaginations, I noticed that this is a fabulous way to organize a project. I found this to be the most realistic way that I might use a wiki in my ESL class, because I already have a Google website for them. As useful as a Google site is, a wiki would be easier to monitor and allow students to post on, I think. Of course, when I use this for one of my projects, I'll make a couple of alterations - like moving the student work page up to a higher level to enhance their feeling of both responsibility when they're not doing their part and accomplishment when they are.

Finally, I looked at the 1001 Tales website. This one, for me, was the most frustrating to navigate because I didn't 100% understand what was happening with the "front page." I couldn't figure out if I should go to another site or what! But once I got my web-feet under me once more, I found one important advantage this website had: safety advice. Again, I bookmarked this website to help me in the future. And, to be honest, I signed up to be notified about next year's 1001 Tales.