Educational Wiki Summary

When I was searching for an educational wiki to review, I had difficulty finding one I liked. I wanted to find one that I could get ideas for my future class. However, many were for older students like high school age and the ones for elementary age were never quite right. Many times they were too disorganized and confusing. The wiki I settled on was Mrs. Anderson's 2nd grade class. While 2nd grade is probably younger than I will be teaching, I really like the overall idea of the wiki. This wiki was designed as a way for parents and other family members to view their child's work. Each child had their own personal page that was a showcase for all their projects. Not only does this make the parents feel included in their child's class, but it also gives the child a since of ownership and pride in their hard work. While I liked the idea, the only thing I have to criticize is the front page. It had a lot of great resources on it, but it was too cluttered. You had to scroll all the way down to find the links to each student's page. When I create my own wiki for my classroom, I will take this into consideration and possibly have those resources on an entirely different page. Overall I loved the idea of having a classroom wiki as a way to exhibit the students' work.

Inquiry Based Activities

This past week I had the opportunity to create and research inquiry based activities. I think inquiry based activities are very good introduction activities to units. It gains the student's interest as well as build prior knowledge. It is very important for inquiry based activities not to be used very frequently. I feel that some teachers may use it as a way to get out of teaching and let the worksheet and computer do the job. However, if not overdone, I can see how inquiry based activities are a great tool to incorporate into the classroom.

I found it difficult to create an inquiry based activity for a deaf classroom. As I was creating my activity I was searching for websites that did not have an overwhelming amount of words and had more images and pictures to support the text. Deaf children can get very overwhelmed with a large text and have difficulty sifting through the text to find key facts. Their language level tends to be somewhat lower because English is not their native language. I also had difficulty creating the worksheet for the activity. Again here, I did not want to overwhelm the children with words. Therefore, I had to be very considerate with the directions. There are two parts of my activity. For a young deaf student, it would be very challenging if I had put the two sets of directions all together at the beginning. They would most likely find this confusing. Therefore, I separated my directions and the websites they were to go to into the order I wanted the students to complete the worksheet. I had a set of directions, the websites and the questions that went along with the website. Then, I included the next set of directions, website, and questions that went directly with that website.

All about WebQuests

This week was my first experience with WebQuests. I had heard about them but had never actually seen one. I had the opportunity to evaluate five WebQuests this week. After evaluating each WebQuests on the criteria of technology, type of questions asked and group work involved, I felt like I had a stronger understanding of what makes a good WebQuest. In my opinion, the most important factor of a good WebQuest is the easiness for kids to use. A WebQuest can have require higher order thinking and be a very original lesson, but without the students being able to easily go from one page to the next and understanding the organization of the website, they will get nothing out of the quest. Overall, I think webquests are a great way to do group work in the classroom. However, I do not think they should be overused. They should be a special activity to keep kids excited about. Also, WebQuests may be difficult to use in certain schools. For example, the school I am at now, does not have class computers. The class has to go to a separate computer lab if computers are needed. Therefore, when I create my WebQuest I will need to either create one that can be done in one period or one that has places to stop and pick up another day.

Reflecting on website evaluation

Overall, I thought the website evaluation process was a good way to determine the quality of a website. I think it was very helpful to have criteria to compare the website to determine if the website was credible. However, because it was more of a checklist of criteria, it was difficult to convey the website's quality as a whole. The website may have partially fit one of the criterion. In this case, I had difficulty deciding whether to say "yes, it had it" or "no, it did not." While there was space to provide comments, I sometimes felt like it was difficult to state specifically why a certain criterion was not met. Also, not all of the criteria was relevant to the website. For example, my website's author and publisher were the same so it made that part seem repetitive. The activity did help me find a great website to use and did confirm it's credibility. A suggestion I have for the next time this activity is given is I would have students share the website they studied. I did this in one of my prior classes in a small group, and instead of only learning about one website, we each learned about five.

How are wikis used in the classroom?

Prior to this class, I had never used a wiki and like many of my classmates, I was having difficulty envisioning how to use a wiki with my students. However, after research ways to use a wiki in the classroom, I realized there are many different ways. I plan on working with upper elementary age students and I was concerned how younger kids could manage a wiki. I think wikis are very easy to use and can be a great way of organizing subject related content. For example, I found that wikis are great for language art purposes. Students can create an annotated virtual library where they have a list of both independent and whole class readings. This is also a great way to do a book share. Students can create an annotated page for their book, including a picture of the cover, information about the author, and a synopsis about the book. Not only can this be used as a visual aid while the students present, but other students can go back and look on the wiki later in the year to find a book to read. Wikis can also act as a class encyclopedia and dictionary. The students can add a word and its definition they learned while reading their book or add an interesting fact in the encyclopedia. Wikis do not have to only be contained to language arts. They can also be used for all other subjects. For math, it can be a place to have all the formulas or key terms the students need to know. Also for science and social studies, key terms and places can be recorded as well as instructions for science experiments. There are so many different ways to introduce wikis to younger students and it will definitely be a tool that I use in my classroom.