All About Wikis

When most people hear the word wiki, it's often accompanied by pedia. Wikipedia is a type of wiki that is widely used and known among most people. Wikipedia is also at the center of controversy in schools. There is a debate over the use of wikipedia and whether or not students should be using it. Wikipedia should be viewed as one of the greatest collaboration projects and a great starting point for any research. Students can learn so much from this model of collaboration.

Wikis are a way in which students can collaborate with each other and with other students and classes. Wikis are a form of online collaboration, which means it can be accessed anytime. Students can collaborate from the classroom, the library, or at home. Students can create wikis to display their research on a topic or as a review. Wikis link to other pages and documents and can be user controlled. Access to wikis can be determined by the author and different people can have different roles. This makes class projects via wikis very easy and safe. I think if wikis are used in the right way, they can become the next model of collaboration in the classroom.

 

Blogs in the Classroom?

Blogs are still a foreign concept to some people. It is even more ridiculous to many other people that blogs would be in the same sentence as school or classroom. There is a lot of talk today around the ideas of testing, standards, and education. Why is it that technology is not in the spotlight when talking about education reform? While this is a very complicated and involved discussion that will not continue much further in this post, it is important to look at how education is portrayed to those of us not in a classroom on a daily basis. I can think of countless articles about school reform efforts, low test scores, poor teacher performance, and schools that are failing students, but it's hard to think of articles that shed light on schools and individual classrooms where students are learning with technology. Even modern day movies (I won't mention any names...) portray classrooms with a chalkboard and teacher desk at the front and student desks all in rows. The image is painted that education has not changed in some time. While those of us on the inside know that this is only partly true, it becomes increasingly difficult to convince others that schools are taking steps into the 21st century utilizing many new tools available for educators and students.

While watching Grey's Anatomy last week, I was encouraged by the use of twitter as a learning tool. Dr. Bailey used twitter to connect surgeons from all over the country by posting updates on the surgeries she was performing. This not only provided them with resources, but was an excellent learning tool for the young and old. There have been many ipad commercials lately targeting education. Well, really it's the same commercial repeated often. There is a section in the commercial specifically for educators, showing some of the apps that are available for education. One part even shows a paper created by a student on the ipad that is being graded by the teacher. These are both promising media plugs that could help people start to visualize schools, learning, and technology interacting together to bring about change. I know this is a very small step, but we have to start somewhere.

Getting the community involved in classrooms is another step to building awareness about the increased use and need for technology integration. Positive news is spread and schools have more resources and collaborative relationships with people in their community. Are you starting to see where blogs fit into the picture? Blogging is a way for people to connect over similar or varying interests and share ideas, opinions, and feelings. Blogging incorporated into student learning can have a tremendous impact on academic performance and student well being. Whether their blogs are public or private, students will learn the dos and don'ts of the blogging and internet world. Some students may even catch the interest of education reformers in the blogging world. Students can use blogs as a type of academic journal exploring feelings and thoughts on what they are learning. They can also use blogs to expand on information they have learned in school. Teachers and other students challenge each other by posting comments on the blog and help each other to understand what was taught. Subjects are immediately expanded when blogged about.

Since the idea of blogging is still relatively new, and education is still way behind in modern times, it's up to us to spread the word. Blogs are just one way in which education can be transformed by the power of integrating technology, plus it saves a whole lot of trees.
For more ways to integrate technology into learning, stay tuned for future posts!