Wikis in My Classroom

A particular interesting use of wikis in education is that of creating online "textbooks." California is working on an Open Source Textbook Project (http://www.opensourcetext.org/) and South Africa has their entire high school curriculum in a wiki (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/South_African_Curriculum). Because the content in my computer programming courses changes rapidly, I'm considering creating a wiki for a textbook supplement that students and I can all update as necessary.

My first experience with creating a wiki project as a group has gone quite well. We are not completely finished but the discussion section of the wiki makes it easy to work out the plans and creating the wiki itself is simple. Links are easy to add and the most challenging part was trying not to spend too much time searching for interesting related media. Once I got on YouTube and got distracted by off-topic videos, I could have spent many unproductive hours there!

I have used Wikipedia for a few years and it has proven to be a fairly reliable resource on most topics that I have read about. I will continue to use it and think it is a valuable tool and also understand that, due to its open-source creation, all information is not always valid and I need to make that distinction when I use it.

Since I have not yet added wiki creation to my courses I'm not sure if I will encounter resistance. I doubt it. The majority of my students are more technically advanced than the average teenager (which is already more advanced than us non-teenagers!) and I believe that they will enjoy the experience and the collaborative effort it will entail.

Wikis

I have been a long-time consumer of Wikis but had never created one myself until recently. There is a lot of good information available regarding how to best use Wikis as a collaboration tool in education but the one that really got my attention was this one: https://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp?bhcp=1

The author stresses an important point. "To truly empower students within collaborative or coconstructed activities requires the teacher to relinquish some degree of control over those activities." I think many objections to the use of Wikis, from parents to administrators to teachers themselves, is that to allow Wikis to work as intended, teachers must give up some of their control and this is a very difficult thing for teachers to do.

As a teacher of juniors and seniors in a high school environment, I feel that students are ready to take on this challenge and it is even a necessary part of their development on their way to the "real world" that is just steps away for most of them. I am going to be the one that needs my hand held, not them.

Pageflakes

Today I discovered Pageflakes and could have spent the rest of the weekend playing with it! There are so many interesting feeds in their directory and it will take time to really customize the flakes but I'm anxious to share this with my students. Good thing I have until the end of August! http://www.pageflakes.com/rebereed/11764062

Learning via RSS

RSS is a handy tool that really saves time. It's taking me some time, however, to get in the habit of checking it on a regular basis but when I do I'm always pleased to see some new and interesting information waiting for me. I hope to continue to add new feeds to keep me informed of issues related to my teaching areas and I also plan to use RSS to keep me current with my students' blogs.

Other teachers have already incorporated RSS into their classrooms and there are many blogs with some good ideas. http://blogs.earthlink.net/2006/08/how_do_you_use_rss_in_the_clas.php

Using Read/Write Web in My Classroom

Over the course of the past few years I have found that my students really enjoy collaborative projects and working with others throughout the day. Because I teach computer programming courses most of my students are proficient with computers and very knowledgeable about new technologies and tools. To offer them a more refined collaborative learning environment I could meet my course learning objectives in a way that would really suit my students and create a network learning community.

I envision that I will continue to use Moodle for delivery of information and some assessments, receipt of assignments and chat sessions as I have in the past. I would like to add some journaling/blogs and more interaction between the students in similar courses and even among students in diverse courses within the department. I find that the AP students (the “varsity” kids) are valuable resources for students just starting out in our programming courses and would like to network them as well.

Student Blogging Projects

Many student blogging projects that I found were from college students discussing their experiences and day-to-day life in the college environment. As many of my students are high school juniors and seniors and much of their lives are consumed by choosing the right college to attend, I feel that reading/interacting with student blogs from colleges they are considering could be very helpful. An example from Cornell University:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Nov06/student.blogs.dea.html

Also, for those high-achieving students who are considering careers that require grad school, there are some great student blogs that really give a clear picture of what is required on a daily basis. http://med.stanford.edu/blogs/students/fall06.html

I think I'd like to use this idea in my own high school courses. For students who are considering taking courses offered by our department or to give introductory students an idea of what is entailed in an advanced course, exposure to other students' blogs could be helpful. Finding out about what's going on in the classroom could really give them more information than the usual one paragraph description in a course catalog.