A Knight's Tale Trailer. Armstrong-history - home. Bookbuddyreviews / FrontPage. School-is-cool / FrontPage. Nutmeg2009 - home. Jabernethy - home. Mrs. Heckman - home. Learning Latin America - home. SchafferMath - home. Mrs. Bolton's Bunch - home. Spintheglobe - home. Wikis. Using Wikis as Electronic Portfolios. For years, my English Language Arts students have assembled portfolios.
I’d give them a manila folder to decorate at the beginning of the school year, designate a special portfolio bin in the classroom, and have students add to their portfolios throughout the year. For years, I’ve not been happy with the process, realizing the kids weren’t actually learning from the process—a process my Arkansas English Language Arts Standards require and I’m assuming many other states require. This year, I decided to tackle electronic portfolios. I wanted students to learn from the process, to reflect on what and how they had learned. I introduced the project at the beginning of the last nine weeks and gave students the entire quarter to create the portfolio.
Throughout the first half of the quarter, I devoted a bit of time each week to in-class discussions of the project. I was amazed at the results: students created websites, new blogs, and combinations of the two. How I use wikis. What do you do? I just got off a great call with Steve Hardagon, of EdTechLive, and Adam Frey, of Wikispaces. We discussed wikis in education and it was a great call, even though I got in trouble for forgetting to mute my mike! (Adam was just saying such exciting things I was scribbling away with my unsharpened pencil and making a racket, I'm sure!
I guess Steve will have a little extra editing to do!) During the last two nights, I've been talking about several things. Here is some information that I want to share with you. How I use wikis in the classroom I have two primary uses: classroom organization and classroom content. Classroom organization The wiki is my hub. Classroom content I've organized my uses into 5 categories of educational uses.1 - Lesson Summaries When we complete a lesson, the students are to post "their lesson" to the wiki. 2 - Collaboration of Notes This is different because this is student driven and student created. 3 - Concept Introduction and Exploratory Projects How do you wiki?
Wiki Walk-Through: The Basics. Basics: What in the world is a wiki?
Roll over the questions at left to unravel the wonderful world of wikis. Freetools.htm. Blog. Blogs & Wikis as WebQuest Tasks - NECC 2004. Wikis, on the other hand, seem tailor-made for WebQuests based on the Compilation or Recommendation designs.
SDSU graduate students compiled a micropedia about Educational Games and Simulations in Fall, 2003 and next Fall's class will add to it. Another compilation example is the Election 2004 WebQuest from Austria in which information about the next U.S. election is collaboratively authored by students. As an example of a Recommendation design, Dan McDowell has written a WebQuest about India and Pakistan which culminates in drafting a peace accord using a wiki.
In summary, these two formats have a lot of potential for use within WebQuests. I hope to hear from some of you in the coming year as you experiment with them in new WebQuests. Landmarks Class Blogmeister. Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool? “Blogs Will Change Your Business” declared the front cover of the May 2, 2005 Business Week.
Without question, the Web publishing format is gaining popularity as a legitimate business and marketing tool. Technologically savvy businesses are using blogs, or weblogs, to build relationships with their customers by sharing information, corporate culture and expertise. Technologically savvy publishers, from the New York Times to freelancers , are also jumping into the medium. Journalists (or would-be journalists, depending on whom you talk to) find blogs are an ideal format for handling breaking news situations and commentary or columns. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, maintains a local breaking news blog that keeps readers abreast of current stories with local significance. But before the fun of posting about earthquakes or political squabbles can start, every new blog publisher faces the problem of selecting, installing and configuring blog software. Blogging jargon The tools. Web Style Guide. From Web Pages That Suck - learn good web design by looking at bad web design.
After 18 years of writing about bad web design, you would think that people would know enough to stop.
There are enough good books, templates and web design firms out there that you would think companies and organizations would have stumbled over at least one of them and fixed their site. Nope. I guess I'm too much of an optimist <grin>. Mr-collins - home. JustRead!