I was amazed by the variety and scope of all the Wikis available online. It was quite overwhelming because beyond using them as an information source I have never really looked into their development, have not contributed to one or developed one of my own. I know…it’s terrible but now I feel like I have missed out and want to begin looking into useful Wikis within my personal and professional life.
My Own Personal Learning
I found that I did a lot of browsing to really get a feel for this Wiki thing and the browsing led me to more and more ways in which you could use Wikis in a variety of ways. From Wikipedia to Wookieepedia (The Star Wars Wiki) there is a world of available Wikis to explore, contribute to and create. I liked the possibility of using it as a group organizational tool after watching commoncrafts’s “Wikis in Plain English.” I never really thought of using a Wiki in this way…it would have been a good way to organize my up-coming 40th birthday/10 year anniversary because I wanted to get feedback from my Toronto friends on good places to go since I haven’t been in the city for the last 15 years. For some reason planning events like these has just gotten more difficult but with the development of all these new technologies like texting and facebooking it has made it easier to keep in touch and communicate with friends, family and colleagues, although I feel I have to tap into more of these resources.
After reading Chapter 4 in Richardson I decided to add to an existing wiki. On page 58 he mentioned the Recipe Wiki @ recipes.wikia.com, this is a great resource and collaboration for great food recipes. I recently received one of those recipe e-mail chain letter, where you are supposed to receive 30 recipes. I only received one and it has been over a month now and I really do hate participating in these things, I find them to be a bit of an inconvenience and waste of time. Instead a Wiki would be a great forum to organize something like this. You could start one with a few of your friends, family or co-workers and then they could invite their friends, family or co-workers and it would spread from there. All would be in one place and easy and convenient to add to at each participant’s leisure.
I added my Spinach Gnocchi recipe to the “Recipes wiki” on wikia, you can find it @ http://recipes.wikia.com/index.php?title=Spinach_Gnocchi&cb=1186. I also created a wiki on wikispaces just to try it out. There is nothing on it but I’d like to think of ways in which I could use it; since I’m not working right now I may try to set up something personal or I would also like to continue with my KidsCanTalk podcasts so maybe it could a forum to share and discuss similar concepts with teachers I know. The link is: https://wikitalk2.wikispaces.com/.
Teaching and Learning
Chapter 4, “Wikis: Easy Collaboration for All” of Will Richardson’s book, had such a wealth of information and amazing ideas for incorporating Wikis into your classroom or library. I’ll provide a brief list here of the ideas presented.
1. Students could add entries to Wikipedia or Simple English Wikipedia after producing a research project on various topics, e.g. global warming, and track whether there are any modifications that could be studied critically.
2. Can be used as a venue for the publication of student’s work where the class as a whole could be responsible for the monitoring, editing and revising of the Wiki.
3. “Collaborative tools among teachers or districts to collect and share information.” (Richardson, 2010, pg.61)
4. Create your own class Wikipedia by generating an “online text for your curriculum that you and your students can both contribute to.” (Richardson, 2010, pg.61)
5. Have students create or edit books on Wikibooks or Wikijunior.
6. Collaborate with other classrooms around the globe in order to investigate each other’s cultures.
7. Build a text for you course by tracking work from class, sharing links, posting results from experiments, etc.
8. Use a Wiki as a yearlong study guide for tests and exams.
9. Produce a book study, which could include interviewing storytellers, creating presentations that are similar to your book and references pages that explain parts of the text, (so many other possibilities here)
I also checked out Wikibooks – open books for an open world and Wikijunior (an offshoot of Wikibooks). These sites were great…I learned a little about lucid dreaming by clicking on browse on the left scroll bar where all books are listed by subject, by completion status or by reading level. There is a cookbook section, some headings include techniques, recipes and ethnic cuisines, and you can also search featured books and are able to choose a random book to explore. There is a link to Wikijunior, this site offers students the ability to contribute to a large range of books in varied subject areas and has great information to use as well. I love the Fun Science Experiments page, which includes slime recipes, red cabbage indicator and pinhole camera on its feature page. It is well organized and so simple to navigate through with resources at your fingertips. The main page lists their main topic headings like discovery and innovation, the natural world, our world of people, school time and pre-readers. It also has a visually appealing bookshelf of titles to choose from. On the right you can choose their full collection, which they divide into two categories, well-developed books and developing books. The site makes it easy to find books that are being developed and encourages your students to contribute to them; the dinosaur page is a great one to look at and has lots of possibilities for new contributions.
If that’s not enough Wikibooks is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, which also hosts:
Wikiversity, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquotes, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Commons and Meta, and that’s only one organization!! There is so much to explore in the WWW…I will keep on venturing into this new territory to make new discoveries.
Oh…if you’re wondering what I’m planning for my 40th/10 year anniversary this Thursday…unfortunately no concrete plans have been made. I think the three of us plus baby in the tummy are going to try to escape and take a little trip…should have used a Wiki!!
Happy Birthday!
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