I have a couple of ideas knocking around in my head about utilizing Wikis to promote sound tech learning. One is to have the students spend some time roaming around Wikipedia, until they find stub entries or empty pages in subjects they have interests in. Then they would do the research to expand those stubs into full-fledged Wikpedia entries, in the proper format (including references).
Another would be to create our own Wiki, and populate it with information that the kids would find useful in school. I got the idea from a 10th grade personal project that a student of mine did last year, a "survival guide" for our school. The kids would populate this wiki with information that other students, especially the younger ones, would find useful. This would become the basis of a "User Guide to BSGE", which will provide advice, coping strategies, and resources the students can use, updated with new information as the students gain experience.
BTW, feel free to "steal" either of these ideas, if in fact they are original, and not accidentally stolen by me because i didn't remember where they came from.
Keywords: student experiences, Wiki
Posted by Shantanu Saha @ Tech Thursdays |
Comments
Having students revise and revamp wikipedia entries may also give them an inkling of why they need to fact check information they get off of it as well as publishing them.
One Idea I've been knocking around is to have a teacher have each student (or groups of students) research different parts of a curriculum unit and write them as they normally would, and then just link them together with a wiki so now they're published, and there's a mini-wiki unit online that other teachers and students can look at, and even add to and modify later.
The reason I like this idea is that it requires very little extra effort on the part of the teacher and I hope it will get the ball rolling as it were....still looking for a partner though!! Then once the teachers are onboard the students will follow I hope.
Wow, I love that second idea. I like the idea of something kids NEED to read...just like when you have kids do "presentations" in class in traditional ed world, but no one needs the information anyone else has, so no one listens. But if you build in a reason for them to use the info--and in this case,that reason is built into the topic itself--then they'll naturally go and use it should be used.
Question, though: I use wikipedia constantly and have never come across a page that isn't already pretty fleshed out. Maybe becuase I just look up stuff like "Guantanamo Bay," but can you give me some examples of stuff kids could look up and add to?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting
That link gets you to the head subject areas of stubs on wikipedia, if you click into one of them a level or 2 down you'll see lists of all stubs in that subject area.