I can't seem to get the Sandbox thing working...Oh well.
I set up my wiki through the district and it has pretty much sat like that all year. It seems that last school year we kept getting new and even more innovative ways to "make" our kids learn. At this point, my students find the use of Wikis and other such sites neat, but ultimately a waste of time. I tried to get mine to access my wiki outside of school and the result was not positive. The fact that just about anyone can "change" it, allowed random stuff to be posted. I had all of these hopes to use it well, but like many other teachers I gave up and went back to more traditional methods of communicating with my students. Students seem to still appreciate a direct teaching approach. I will not be attempting to incorporate it next year.
I started uploading as many of my assignments to my Wiki page as I could last year and had about the same reaction as you seem to have had. I'm not sure if any student downloaded anything all year. However, this summer, I made the site an integral part of the classroom. I posted links to interactive websites, lab simulations and uploaded assignments that I never even made a paper copy of. I had students do some assignments as word documents where they filled in the answers and uploaded those documents to their own websites. Others, I put the word doc. online and had them fill in answers in an online testing site that would grade them for me. After a little frustration from the kids feeling that the computer was too picky about spelling and spacing and such it worked out fairly well. I think I will be integrating it more this year as I work out the bugs. I can't argue that there is a learning curve that takes up valuable classroom time to overcome, and I would never argue that this is how all teaching/learning should be done, but I think it is a powerful tool that adds to a teacher's repertoire of ways to engage students.
ReplyDeleteGreat ideas and practical uses David! You can set a wiki to only post what you approve. That should cut down on the inappropriate comments.
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