Thing #8

Wikis are definitely in my future as an educator. Browsing the wikis showed me the variety of uses and applications. Wikis are as diverse as blogs and can be just as interesting. There were some that were very structured and contained many links to other sites for informative purposes, and others that were less structured and fun-to-read. By far, my favorite thing I found while browsing wikis was called a voki. It dazzled me so much that I automatically knew that Grazing for Digital Natives would be bookmarked for future use. A few of the wikis were daunting because of all the information that was presented, and seemed to taken a lot of time and effort, which I usually run out of during the school year. Even though they were perfect resources for students, after a while it seemed that making sure the weekly lessons and assignments were linked would become an exhausting task. It almost seemed that I would need a webmaster to do all this and take care of my classroom duties as well. I also thought about the over-achievers who would look ahead and be ready to teach the lesson by the time we started. This would actually be a plus because I would probably ask that student to take it further and do a little web-research to find real world applications and present those to the class. Then I saw the sites that were more student-generated. These sites seemed much more manageable due to the fact that the students performed the research and linked the sites they felt had great information. In this type of wiki, I would just make sure the information they linked was accurate and since the students generated it, I feel their peers would be more open to using it. I also like the idea of students being able to collaborate and find their own resources. My favorite example of this actually came from the Wiki Wiki teaching blog post where the students created their own wikis to study and review for their tests. I was thinking of using a blog to do this, but I believe the wiki worked better. My all-time favorite wiki, however, balanced information with fun. In this one, there were virtual clinics that had doctors (with personalities) and patients that had to be diagnosed. In this one, the students explored the human body and had fun while doing so. I plan to find some wikis like this that are related to the topic I am teaching and allowing my students to explore them as an alternative to guided practice worksheets.