Christine Bowen     Week #3

I had an immediate idea as to what I would use a wiki for.  I am going to try and use a wiki for book reviews of the 20 most popular books in my classroom.  I am going to have the students take a picture of the book in the classroom, this will help with their digital camera experience, and then upload it with a review to the wiki.  I will have to play with this and see how it goes.  This week is conferences so our schedule is too hectic but I think I am going to start it Monday. 

I didn’t know what a wiki was before this week.  I assumed it was related to Wikipedia.  After I discovered how easy one was I searched the internet for teacher wikis.  There are some amazing teaching wikis out there!!!  I searched everything from elementary to secondary level.  I found teacher posting videos of science experiments, field trips and written work.   

I was confused as to the difference between a blog and a wiki so I had to search that also.  It appears that a blog can only by altered by the author of the site where a wiki can be altered by anyone.  This could make for some really interesting assignments.  If we were doing an economics lesson, I could have someone from a local bank make posts onto the wikis about checking accounts and where students could go locally to sign up for me.  Another idea I really like is a, “What Do I Think Will Be on the Test” section.  Students can post what they think they will need to know for exam time under this section.  I think this would be awesome if I can get them to post quickly where it doesn’t take up a lot of classroom time.  Maybe, once a week or every other week they could have some time to post what they thought was interesting or important from a unit.  Again, I need more time to play to see if this would be a problem. I didn’t have any problem making my wiki link live in my blog so it looks like the two work well together.     

About a year ago, I tried to set up an English facebook page.  They did not go well.  Some of the students did not have appropriate profile pictures and I wanted the site to strictly be used for English.  This appears to be a good replacement.  I am concerned if my students are mature enough to handle the flexibility that a wiki will provide.

The O’Reilly article was a bit descriptive for me.  I tried really hard to understand all of it but I only understand the popular items such as Google, Amazon, etc. However, if the point was to understand that technology/software is changing then I got it.  The videos were pretty good but I was nervous about the wiki assignment.  However, after doing some reading and looking through other teacher’s wikis I can see why they are so popular.