As I see it, there are many valuable wiki applications which can be developed for the media center and for the school population as well. First of all, a wiki is a great format for developing projects using teacher and peer review. Students can write, edit, and submit assignments with teacher guidance. The wiki could also be made available for parent review as well. Group authoring, keeping track of group projects, and creating simple web-pages are other great applications. A wiki is a great choice for 4th and 5th grade students who need to set up web-pages for projects. In my opinion, a wiki is less cumbersome and complicated to set up than a student web-page. So, it's a great way to introduce them to this form of communication.
Another application is for teacher-wikis, as oppossed to teacher web-pages. It's just another communication option. My son's 6th grade challenge language arts teacher uses a wiki for parent communication. She lets us know when important projects are due, what's going on in the classroom, and other important information. We (parents) have the opporuntity to make comments, but she screens the comments before posting. I guess I would do the same......
The wiki is for us to "visit" her, whenever we feel, as opposed to her "visiting" us with continual e-mail blasts. She does send occassional e-mails to alert us when she's posted something new and relevant to her wiki. I really appreciate the effort she's making in keeping parents updated.
As a media specialist, I envision my role as assisting classroom teachers with setting up their own wikis as well.
The Media Center could have it's own wiki featuring links to information such as:
How to use OPAC
How to search Galileo
How to use equipment such as Flip and Digital Cameras
How to use the document camera
I would post links to important articles and resources meeting cirriculum and IB requirements
The possibilities are endless.....
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The possibilities are indeed endless, Teresa! Aside from all the great uses I saw in your post, one of the features I saw on several of the sample school wikis I looked at were pathfinders, and I thought, "What a great idea!" Creating pathfinders is an important part of the media specialist's job, but why not make them a collaborative effort, so that students and teachers also contribute by including resources they find related to a given topic? After just a few years, it would be possible to have a great wealth of information on rainforests or the American Revolution or Shakespeare's works, helping students to get a positive start on projects instead of feeling overwhelmed about how to begin.
ReplyDeleteUntil this class, I had no experience with wikis at all. The possibilities are endless! I'm really impressed with your son's teacher. If she's using wikis in her classroom, I bet they're using new technology all of the time. I can imagine that it would be a great way to keep parents informed. And with screening the responses, it allows her to control what is posted. When I was looking at all of the examples of wikis that Dr. B posted, I really enjoyed seeing how different schools used wikis. The Unquiet Library really struck me as more of a webpage than just a wiki. Again, I'm new to wikis. When I am a media specialist, I would create a wiki to keep parents aware of any themes or special things going on at the library. I would link parents to helpful websites. And of course, I would want to preview any comments before I actually allowed them to become public. Wow wikis....endless possibilities!
ReplyDeleteUsing a wiki for group projects is something that I believe that teachers should encourage. There are so many times that students are working on projects together. They could use the wiki to post information that they have found and to communicate different ideas with each other. They could effectively work together on a group project through using a wiki while they are miles apart. The possibilities of a using a wiki in a school environment are endless. Your ideas on how the media specialist can use a wiki are great. The media specialist can put up different how to guides up on the wiki for how to use the different equipment. Teachers and other staff members can get on and post to the how to guides any helpful hints that they want to share with others. It can become a great place to collaborate among the teachers and staff of a school.
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