Wikis in the Classroom
“I enjoy working on our classroom's wiki the most because you can edit it anywhere. I also enjoy when we are assigned to work on the wiki because it makes me challenge myself to find creative and informational ways to make our wiki look professional…I am very proud that we use these tools class. It not only challenges me academically but it also widens my knowledge of computers and technology.” ----Kathleen, Age 12
“I personally think that a lot more people contribute to our wiki page than to podcasts. Wikis catch students’ attention and teach people writing skills and facts we may never have known. They are good for learning and sharing and I think they are important to our classroom.” ---Brooke, Age 11
What are we doing?
In collaboration with Mike Hutchinson, I have begun to introduce the tools of the Read/Write web to my students. Specifically, our classes have created wikis. Our wikis have allowed us to create a forum where students can reflect on the content that they are learning in class while developing language arts skills like drafting, revising, proofreading, and publishing. It has also given students the opportunity to be creators—rather than simply consumers—of online content.
Together, our students have collaborated on the creation of over 240 different pages of web content covering topics across the curriculum ranging from genre to geology. Nearly 1,500 individual edits had been added during the course of the 2007-2008 school year. Our wikis have given our students an audience for their ideas, which has increased levels of interest and motivation in our classrooms.
How do we do it?
· A free wiki service called PB Wiki (http://pbwiki.com) hosts our work. This service is only one of many wiki services being used by educators, but it is highly regarded as the most “kid-friendly” product available. Perhaps most importantly, PB Wiki does not provide public discussion forums—which often become havens for inappropriate conversations between anonymous users.
· Our wiki is currently private and password protected, creating a safe and controlled environment. In the future, we may open our wiki to outsiders for viewing. To ensure that inappropriate content is not posted, however, we will never open it for editing.
· Whenever we study a new topic in class, Mike and I create a new page with titles and subtitles for students to add content to. Students then “fill” new pages with content additions and edits.
· We’ve taught students to make two kinds of contributions to our wikis: significant contributions and constructive modifications. Significant contributions are new additions of content not yet included in our wiki. Constructive modifications are edits to existing content. Constructive modifications can include correcting inaccurate information or grammatical errors, adding links to external information, inserting pictures or polishing page layout.
· We will sometimes assign our students wiki pages as the final product for group studies of classroom content. Students collaborating together on a wiki page have the opportunity to work with one another asynchronously. What’s more, students can use the commenting section of each wiki page to plan their ongoing efforts.
· We visit our wiki weekly in class, highlighting high-quality contributions or modifications. Occasionally we’ll assign wiki-work and take a grade on contributions made by students.
Why it Matters?
· Wikis encourage students to use the web for two-way communication: Few people would argue that the Internet is increasingly becoming an important vehicle for personal and professional communication. To prepare students for this new digital reality, educators must take time to introduce students to tools and skills for digital collaboration. Wikis do just that. As Hannah writes, “The wiki is also written by the kids who were there listening to the teacher. And another cool thing about the Wiki is that the students help each other out. If someone made a mistake, we can easily go to the Wiki website and fix it or add to it. It’s fun to watch the pages change.”
· Wikis generate increased interest in classroom content: In our digital world, it has become increasingly difficult to engage children in meaningful studies of content. Wikis, however, has made that possible for us. 100% of our students report enjoying wiki work and feeling a sense of pride in what we are creating. 78% of our students report using our wiki as a study guide for tests and 91% agree that our wiki has made them more interested in current events and classroom content. As Andrew writes, “I like the wiki the best because everyone can participate in it at home and no one is left out…Wikis provide instant access to great information--- and the info you are looking for is always there!”
· Wikis reinforce skills across the curriculum: Students working with wikis utilize skills from across the curriculum. Of particular interest, wikis give students opportunities to practice revising and editing. By “polishing” information that has been posted by others, students learn to identify and correct common writing errors. They also learn the importance of verifying online information before accepting it as fact. As Abbey wrote, “I like the fact that we get to edit things via the computer. This improves our typing skills and we get better at editing… I am proud of the fact that I edit other people's work and I fix their errors. This makes me feel smart.”
Wiki Requirements
While working to set up our wiki project, Mike and I stumbled across a blog post written by Canadian math teacher and Web 2.0 expert Darren Kuropatwa outlining two specific types of wiki contributions that students could make while working together to create content for classroom projects. Liking the categories and understanding that structure would be essential to making wiki work practical for our middle grades students, Mike and I have begun to use the following handout with our students to detail the expectations that we have for productive contributions to our classroom wiki:
Student Name: ____________________
Over the next two weeks, every student is required to make a contribution to our classroom wiki. Your contributions can be one of the following two types:
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Significant Contribution:
A significant contribution is a new content addition to any wiki page. To qualify as a significant contribution, your entry must be at least 4-5 sentences long, include accurate information and reflect a deep level of understanding about the topic that you are writing about.
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Constructive Modification:
A constructive modification is when you edit someone else’s work—not your own. You might correct a significant error or several small errors. Maybe you want to reorganize a page or the navigation from the home page. Maybe you want to edit someone else's entry, not for content, but for the way it's written such as by adding some meaningful details, interesting language or graphics. The main idea here is to move this section of the wiki forward in some constructive way.
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Scoring:
Significant Contributions:
Is the contribution related to current content? Is it accurate? Does it include an extensive amount of detailing? Is the language accurate enough to be understood easily?
Constructive Modifications:
Were the modifications done correctly? Did the corrected information need correction? Did the modifications clarify language that was confusing? Did the modifications make the language more interesting to read or more fluent? Did the modifications add to the piece in a meaningful way? Is the entry noticeably improved after the modifications?
REMEMBER TO SIGN YOUR REVISIONS SO THAT WE KNOW WHICH CHANGES WERE YOURS!
Scoring categories and language created by Darren Kuropatwa:
http://adifference.blogspot.com/2006/04/wiki-solution-manuals.html
Student Roles for Wiki Projects
http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/the_tempered_radical/2008/06/creating-wiki-r.html
I've been doing a lot of work with wikis this year, writing about wiki safety and trying to define wiki-goodness. One of the lessons that I've learned about wiki projects with kids is that the organic creation that defines Wikipedia doesn't always work with middle schoolers!
You see, Wikipedia is completely fine with the inevitably unbalanced participation of those who are creating pages with one another. While some members will edit pages thousands of times and make significant changes in both content and structure, most will only make a few contributions every now and then.
If left to chance, that same unbalanced participation pattern becomes evident in classroom wiki projects as well. While that pattern is worth embracing for informal wiki efforts, I've found that when using wikis as a group project to assess learning, middle schoolers need a set of specific tasks. Sometimes, shared participation is more important to me than individual exploration.
This blog post will introduce you to a collection of student roles that I've created to encourage equal participation in wiki projects.
Defining Wiki-Goodness
http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/the_tempered_radical/2008/05/defining-wiki-g.html
One of the greatest challenges that I've had to work through over the course of the past few years is defining exactly what good wikis look like. For me, this has been a pretty critical task, primarily because I've started to use wikis more and more often as final products for classroom projects. While I'm not sure that my definitions of wiki-goodness are perfect yet, this blog post defines the criteria that I look for when judging the collaborative work that my students do with one another on our classroom wiki projects.
The Wild World of Wikis
http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/the_tempered_radical/2007/12/the-wild-world.html
Session Wikis
The following wikis have been created by the students of Bill Ferriter's classes. They will be explored during the MEGA session on March 13th:
Pink Panthers Wiki
http://pinkpanthers.pbwiki.com
This wiki was created during the 2006-2007 school year. One of the best examples of a wiki project page can be found at http://pinkpanthers.pbwiki.com/Gulags. This page was created by a group of four girls who were studying Russia. While checking out this page, please note how the comment section of this wiki page has been used for planning and feedback purposes. Also notice how students have included a wide variety of links to external sources that can be used by readers to validate the information shared on this wiki page.
Trivium Wiki
This wiki was created during the 2007-2008 school year. One of the best examples of how wikis can be used as pre-writing for classroom blogging projects or as a review for classroom content can be found at: http://trivium.pbwiki.com/Current+Events+Scribe. Each of the pages listed here is a student generated summary of a current event studied in class. Called a "scribe post," students are selected to create a review that other students can use to catch up on missed current events. The content here is then frequently copied to become a post on our classroom blog.
Stay Current
This wiki was created in the 2007-2008 school year by two language arts and social studies teachers at Salem Middle School. It is designed as a planning wiki for a daily current events lesson that incorporates reading skills aligned with a common reading assessment given in all Wake County middle schools known as Blue Diamond. The teachers who use Stay Current work together to post current events that are connected to the social studies curriculum and to write questions modeled after the question stems that students must master to be prepared for the North Carolina End of Grade exams. By collaborating on this work, the teachers involved save one another time. They've also succeeded in making their work transparent for their parents and students.
Additional Wiki Examples
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Title: New York City Lab School for Collaborative Education
(http://schools.wikia.com/wiki/Physics)
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The
One of their most impressive efforts is a wiki being developed in conjunction with several other
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Title: The Scribe Post Hall of Fame
http://thescribepost.pbwiki.com/
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Scribe posting is one simple way to begin blogging and wiki work in your classroom. Essentially, a scribe post is some form of summary of a daily lesson created by students and posted in a classroom blog or wiki.
Scribe posts allow students to explore a wide range of Web 2.0 tools and often incorporate photo or video elements created with different services available online. They also serve as an excellent review tool for students absent from class or preparing for an upcoming exam.
This particular link connects to an archive of some of the best scribe posts created by students of Darren Kuropatwa’s high school math classes.
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Title: Sargent Park UnProjects
http://spunproject07.pbwiki.com/
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Like blogs, wikis are also easy and approachable Web 2.0 tools that appeal to novice technology users. Essentially editable websites, wikis allow students to collaborate on the creation of content for the Internet.
This wiki—also created by eighth grade students at Sargent Park Middle School—was used as a final project in a mathematics classroom. In groups of two or three, students created a web page that taught mathematical concepts to their peers.
While exploring, notice the wide range of web based tools that students used while creating their “unprojects.”
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Title: Applied Math 40s Solutions Manual
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Another project of high school math teacher Darren Kuropatwa, this wiki was designed to be a “collaborative solutions manual” for students in his applied mathematics class.
Kuropatwa began this simple project by posting a collection of problems from several different areas of study and required students to solve those problems collaboratively. Each student was expected to make at least two contributions to the collaborative solution manual during the course of the school year and marks were awarded for participation.
The end result is an impressive website that can be easily mirrored by mathematics teachers and students at any grade level!
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