Thing #16: Wikis

Hurrah for wikis! Getting everyone's ideas down in one place without everyone having to be IN the same place...woo hoo! The possibilities are limitless IF everyone has access to the technology. Teachers can use them for planning within grade levels, across grade levels...heck, in ALL kinds of planning! I'd like to have a wiki to help me collaborate with my teachers and another one set up for students where they can share book reviews and create lists of "must-reads." How about one to collect website resources for student learning? If you find a good educational website, let everyone know...add it to the wiki!

I'd like to have book clubs for my teachers, both for professional development and just for fun, but sometimes it's difficult to get everyone together. Perhaps a wiki is the solution (although I think the face-to-face synchronous interaction is an important part of a book club).

I wish I'd been able to use a wiki back when I was teaching eighth grade langauge arts. I taught three different sections a day, and often, these classes were reading the same shared reading passage. The students of each class would annotate a passage as I recorded the annotations on the overhead. They had complete ownership of the annotations, so as you can imagine, each class's perception of the piece was often different from the other classes'. First period might find something in the text that third period didn't. I was perplexed. How to share first period's observations with third period without seeming like I was pointing out that third period had "missed" something (and implying they hadn't done a good job)? With a wiki, all three of my language arts sections could have worked collaboratively as one unit and put all their ideas together as one shared understanding of the text. Fabulous!