Thing #8 WIKIS

After reading Vicki Davis's blog post, I am encouraged to try a wiki in my classroom. My initial thoughts are that this is overwhelming (where do you start?) and complicated, but I really want to learn this so I am going to play around with it this summer. I would love to have a wikispace for our egg hatching project as well as a novel study, much like the Go West site below. I really liked these things from these wiki pages I looked at:

• 1001 Flat World Tales The students were trained how to critique their peer's work by not being a "nice" king or a "lazy" king, but by being a "good" king who gives good, thoughtful comments.
• Turn Homeward, Hannalee The technical notes detailed how they used other software within the wikispace. "The students used Powerpoint to annotate all of the photos and drawings in the Idiom Dictionary, Figures of Speech, Object Museum and New Manchester Mill sections. They then exported the slides as JPGs, and uploaded them to Bubbleshare, where they created the photo albums that are embedded into the wiki pages. The Civil War Timeline was created using Timeliner 5.1 and exported as a JPG. The audio clips in Reader's Theater and Aura Lee were recorded using Audacity and the Musician's Friend Podcasting Production Kit #3 (even though they are not podcasts). " I am wondering if we have Timeliner software and am thinking we could use Garage Band to record/include a reader's theater section.
• Go West I enjoyed reading the teacher's reflections. She was genuinely enthused about the wiki project and noted that the students' excitement never waned and that their research skills were honed because they wanted to add to their project.