Thing 14

Really cool to see some of those wikis. I still don't feel prepared to do one yet but I guess I'll figure it out on the next lesson! The overview slide show about wikis makes it look so easy but after looking at some, I see lots of features they didn't discuss. Like everything else this will take me some time! I looked at a number of the wikis posted. One of my favorites was the Thousands Project. I loved the idea and some of the questions they asked because the questions were designed to really find out about others. Our kids are so self-consumed these days I really liked what this could bring out in them. Just the nature of asking for a thousand responses to their monthly question brings a global response for them to interact with and I think that is humbling and kind of mind-boggling. It definitely brings us to consider ourselves as just a drop in the ocean. This one seemed very easy for any classroom to do. I also like the Seuss wiki. I really liked the organization to it. All the parts (pages?) were listed on the side and I could easily navigate to the portions I wanted to visit. It was like a table of contents for the wiki. Some of the links I could not get to - the page was not available, so I don't know if the author had some things protected or not. I did see she was licensed under the Creative Commons logo. I also saw a slide show by BubbleShare which looked interesting. I haven't come across that yet in our lessons, so that may be one I have to look up! I also noticed the embedded videos in the Primary Math wiki. My daughter is taking on online Math class this summer and she has had to teach math lessons and videotape them, upload them to UTube so her teacher can download them and grade them. I noticed this video was from UTube so I'm wondering if that is how this class is working. I see lots of possibilities for the use of wikis in the classroom at any age, which is exciting. I'm thinking it might be a neat staff development session for me to have my Tech Facilitator teach my teachers how to create a wiki with their kids. I really think a number of them would take off on this. I see professionally a use within the elementary principal community where we could exchange ideas for campus improvement plans, staff development sessions, etc. We rarely get an opportunity to share ideas and yet I think that is so important. This may give us an arena for that. Very interesting!