Week 7

THING #16-Wiki's and Innovative ways to use them.

I went to several wikis posted on Classroom Learning 2.0 and found Mr. Miller's English 10 wiki.  The address is:  http://bhsenglish10.wikispaces.com/ What a wonderful site!  Mr. Miller thoroughly engaged his students.  They were responding to blog postings he made, which included blogs about assignments, comments on videos, and responses to other students.  Mr. Miller included pictures of his class, links, suggestions, and assignments.  I would like to have been in this class!  I also really enjoyed the teacher librarian wiki:  http://teacherlibrarianwiki.pbworks.com I can see myself using this tool as a librarian.  Connecting with others in the profession is priceless.  I also liked that you had to sign up to comment.  I think that helps people remember to be professional as they are adding comments and pages to the wiki.  Under the title of Cool Ideas, Tony Doyle wrote about his book talks where he takes a cart with books and visits classrooms.  I know this is often done when librarians are sharing a library and have to wheel a cart to the classrooms, but this was for a different reason. Mr. Doyle mentioned that since he's been making these talks more students are enjoying and participating in Silent Sustained Reading time.

When I perused through the Discovery Resources I learned that wiki means quick in Hawaiian.  According to Wikipedia, a wiki farm is a server or an array of servers that offer users tools to simplify the creation and development of individual, independent wikis.  A DIY wiki is one that you set up on your own server.  Meredith Farkas said on Web Junction, "The possiblilities for what libraries can do with wikis are endless.  At their least, they are spaces for quick and easy collaborative work.  At their best, they can become true community resources that can position the library as an online hub of their local community."
(http://www.webjunction.org/technology/web-tools/articles/content/438229)

THING #17-Add to Sandbox wiki

I was pleased to discover that the Sandobox wiki is a PB wiki.  In my first class at Clarion, last fall, my group, Melissa, Regina, Becca, and myself, had a wiki on PB for a budget project. http://group3budget.pbworks.com.  I also used a wiki for my 574 Web Searching class final project last Spring because it was too large and the Clarion server wouldn't accept it by email or on blackboard and I needed a way to get it to the Botany teacher I had done the research for.  Besides, it took up too much room on my computer!  http://Ls574w8bonnie.pbworks.com/

So, I have added my lesson for a 5th grade poetry unit to the Sandbox wiki. The URL is:  http://classroomlearning2.pbworks.com/SandBox.  This was much easier to edit than the one that is currently on our class blackboard site!  (I need to call blackboard help for that.) I think that students would enjoy this unit and it could be done by a 5th grade teacher and a librarian in conjunction with each other, a bit of team teaching!