I think I should first of all begin by linking you to my Wiki Space! It's basic - I've played around with it a little bit, so it's messy - but it's an organised mess! Find it HERE!
As I began thinking today about how great these technological tools would be in a classroom, the internet at the library cut out, so I had to find a plan B! I 'hotspotted' my personal device and I kept blogging! Perfect...almost...this wouldn't work in a school setting though, I couldn't have 25 students all logging onto my personal internet...lesson learnt? NEVER rely on technology and always have a plan B, C, D - Z!
Some immediate differences I noticed about a WikiSpace were that it can have multiple authors. This is great for group collaborations and work..I don't like however that it only saves one author's work at a time - this would limit how students worked on these documents outside of school. I think that for a possibility of marking though, a WikiSpace would be a great tool, because I would have access and be able to add in ideas, corrections etc that the students can work with in real time. Long gone are days of waiting for assessment results to come back in.
I like how you can link key words to a new page and then keep elaborating on the new idea! It's like a real life interactive flow chart that keeps information very clear and accessible for students.
My second teaching area is dance and like every other subject in the Australian Curriculum it is very involved! Like most creative subjects - engagement in the younger years is vital. Often these students are coming through because of rotations and not necessarily because they want to be the next winner of So You Think You Can Dance. I think using a WikiSpace could be a great way to engage students in the subject even if the practical side of it doesn't come naturally or easily.Reading through the description of dance for year seven and eight - I was trying to find one of the elements that I could cover using a WikiSpace and I found one that I thought was perfect!
'draw on dances from a range of cultures, times and locations as they experience dance' if you're interested about reading further into what the dance curriculum covers, I've linked it in for you (or you can focus on your own curriculum, I'm not offended).
To explore this concept, I could set up teams through my WikiSpace! Team 1, Team 2, Team 3 and add students in accordingly. I could then from here, assign each group an area of the world to research in their groups. Instead of just pulling out the butchers paper and having them draw me a mind map with brief descriptions, they could build this online and link actual examples in i.e. youtube clips of traditional dances for those areas. They could set it up how they liked, using new pages for seperate countries or any extra information they want to delve into. The best thing about this is working in groups, we would cover more content in a shorter amount of time and working online means we build a library of resources to refer to. Once we came back together as a class, each group could present it as a discussion and teach the rest of the class about what they had learnt. This could even be done as a practical demonstration if the students were confident with that. This would be a great way to even get the 'non dancers' involved in the lesson!
I still have a lot to learn about WikiSpaces! Imagine what I could plan when I completely understand them!
I'd love to hear your ideas or experiences with WikiSpaces!
Ella.
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