Week 3 | Digital tool 2: Wikis for Collaborative Learning

Source: Pagemodo

Until now wikis to me, have been tumultuary and claustrophobic. Which is to say - not entirely successful. I was successful at creating a wiki once, that was before they decided to change the format of them and hit the user-friendliness of it out of the ballpark. 

Source: Google Images

Although, through researching ways that wikis can be used inside the classroom, I might well be on a home run. 

Source: Google Images

Wikis, by definition are editable pages or to liken to, an endless supply of butchers paper. How they are used in the classroom, and their effectiveness is entirely up to the teacher and to assist in ideas, here are some ways that would benefit student learning. 

• Collaborate on projects - Products of research projects, especially collaborative group projects: war battles, artistic movements, the Australian electoral process, diseases and prevention, etc. Remember that the products do not have to be simply writing. They can include computer files, images, videos, etc. Creating an organizational structure for the content is an important part if the project.

• Share information - images, data etc - An FAQ (or NSFAQ- Not So Frequently Asked Questions) wiki on your current unit topic. Have students post KWL entries and continue adding questions that occur to them as the unit progresses. As other students add their “answers,” the wiki will evolve into a student-created guide to the topic. Example: Civil War FAQ or Biomes FAQ. You may find that the FAQ process can entirely supplant traditional classroom activities, especially if you seed a few questions as the teacher. This would also depend on whether you have consistent computer access on a daily basis, a luxury many schools do not have.

• Technical information - Study Guides made by student groups for themselves and peers.

• Free expression - Articles by students who miss school for family trips,  written about their travels on the class wiki, relating what they see to concepts learned before they left: mammals I saw on the way to Disney, geometric shapes in the Magic Kingdom, the most cost-effective lunches while traveling, etc. Remember: hotels usually have Internet access. Make the world a part of your classroom!

• Professional development workshops - What I Think Will Be on the Test wiki: a place to log review information for important concepts throughout the year, prior to taking the “high stakes” test, AP test, or final exam. Students add to it throughout the year and even from year to year.

• Regular student participation - Vocabulary lists and examples of the words in use.

While these points mimic a blog there are some differences;

What is the difference between a wiki and a blog?

 A blog, or web log, shares writing and multimedia content in the form of “posts” (starting point entries) and “comments” (responses to the posts). While commenting, and even posting, are open to the members of the blog or the general public, no one is able to change a comment or post made by another. The usual format is post-comment-comment-comment, and so on. For this reason, blogs are often the vehicle of choice to express individual opinions.

A wiki has a far more open structure and allows others to change what one person has written. This openness may trump individual opinion with group consensus. (The Source for Learning, 2014)

So in a snap shot, wiki pages evolve because they can be added, changed and deleted by the people who are given permission, but a blog is only evolving if people post comments on specific posts, of which can not be changed, other than by the individual who wrote the post. Used in this way, wikis can become a transformational level of learning for students, whereby, modification allows for collaboration and shared feedback on ideas and work tasks, and at the redefinition level, where students could connect to another classroom in another state or country to write narratives about historical or current events using written, video or audio which is then embedded into the wiki page.

Source: Pagemodo

Week 3 | Digital tool 1: Blogs for learning

This week's first reflective blog is about the use of the weblog tool to enhance classroom interactions.

Firstly to be a successful blogger, you must enjoy reading. Because blogging is first, and foremost about reading. As Stephen Downes writes,

"blogging isn't really about writing at all, but rather more the end result of the process". 

Blogs provide a way for students to reflect, expand and carry on with a topic or idea, to engage and encourage other audiences to write and think. In his article, Educational Blogging, Downes (2004) writes about five ways that blogs can enhance education in classrooms;

Source: Fodey.com

So

However, while blogging is a fun way of engaging students in creative writing, it can have its minuses. The P.M.I chart below provides some of the advantages. disadvantages and interesting bits researched.

Note: This PMI chart was created in word, then snipped and saved as a jpeg file, which can be inserted into blogs.

The real drawback I notice in using a blog is the lack of student interaction with them. After all, don't we write so people will read them! and then respond with their own thoughts? (as in, we want people to know what we are thinking, and then tell us they feel the same or not) And if people are not reading them, why would they want to comment. This is where blogging is losing the interest of would be journalists everywhere. I therefore see blogging as an enhancement tool at the augmentation level, and nothing more than a substitution (pen to keyboard) tool with some functionality (being able to share it with others and auto save).

 Remember: Reflection is a complex process for students and requires significant skill in analysis, evaluation and synthesis. Therefore, if you are asking your students to journal in a Blog, consider ways to scaffold their thinking to reflect the learning they are required to demonstrate, such as De Bonos six thinking hats, or Blooms revised taxonomy questions.

This week I have also experimented with adding gadgets to the blog. This was fun, although frustrating at times, especially when trying to find placements and  adjusting the size. I continue to experiment with different tools and images to add flair to the blog and hopefully capture readers.