Donna's Blog

North Carolina Wiki

Description

"Wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick." A wiki is a website that contains information about a topic that is added and edited by thousands of people. Any information that is put on the site can be deleted or edited by anyone else. There are no restricitions to adding incorrect information, but others will usually correct or delete it. An example of a wiki that is currently online that most people have seen is Wikipedia.org, an online encyclopedia with more than 500,000 entries. In the classroom, wikis can be built by students and teachers to share information with current or future classes, complete with relevant resources and links.

Key Findings from Readings

In the Engstrom/Jewett article, the authors describe a wiki project called Under Control: The Damming of the Missouri River that they did with middle school students. They chose to use the Twiki software program for this project, for several reasons. One, it allowed them to limit access to the wiki site to only students and teachers involved in the project, so students' privacy could be protected. Also, teachers could access all the wiki pages, but students were only allowed to access the pages for their small group, preventing students from changing (or vandalizing) others' work. In addition, Twiki uses a page-locking system, which only allows one person to edit a page at the time. A notice would pop up on the screen if someone attempted to edit a page that was already being edited by someone else. This prevented one user's edits from being deleted. Another key point Engstrom and Jewett made in the article was that the students needed to be divided into small groups of 4-6 students to minimize the chance of students attempting to access the same wiki page at the same time. A technology-related issue from the article was that some teachers experienced problems with students being locked out of wiki pages because they were trying to edit the same page at the same time. This seemed to happen more with teachers who were having their whole class use the school computer lab at one time to access the wiki. When teachers divided their classes into small groups in which each student had a specific job relating to different areas of the wiki, being locked out wasn't a problem.

Applications for Teaching

I would like to start a wiki about North Carolina with my fourth graders. Ideally, it would involve students and teachers from schools across the state. I know that would be a huge undertaking with permission needed from lots of principals, but with some work, I think it could be done. I would like to model it after Wikipedia to be sort of an online North Carolina encyclopedia. It could be organized by the state's regions - coast, piedmont, and mountains, and then students could be further organized into small groups by categories such as famous North Carolinians, history, cities, landmarks, time periods in the state's history, etc. The advantage to having schools across the state involved would be that each group may be more familiar with its own region, and also might have more access to materials about that region.

Posted at 12:40PM Jun 19, 2006 by DEAL, DONNA in General  |  Comments[0]