Weekly+Report

Weekly Report
We'll use this page to share ideas, resources, and lessons from our weekly reports:

Name: Audrey Onsdorff I apologize for this being a little tardy with my weekly response.
 * Week of May 4th, 2009**

I have not dabbled with wikis because I do not feel that I am comfortable enough with them to have my students use them yet. This will be one of the many things I will be working on this summer. I have, though, used Google Docs for my French 4 end-of-the-year project. They used both the word document and the presentation document. I liked the fact that I could observe their progress through the project. Also, I find that when kids use their own traditional word document or powerpoint, I seem to run into problems with compatibilities issues. Some kids, actually one in particular, refused to use the powerpoint in Google docs because he said it was not user-friendly and did not have all the bells and whistle that he would like to use in his presentation. Come presentation day, he did not use __**any**__ of these " bells and whistles" he had mentionned earlier.

Overall, I really liked the experience. Everybody is wokring with the same document, hense less compatibilities issues. Oh, I forgot to mention that one of my students doesn't even have Microsoft word or Powerpoint, so this was a lifesaver for her. I will continue to use this application in my classes next year. I will take maybe a class period to show them how Google Docs works in general, particularly the SHARE feature.

That is all folks!

Name: Taylor Porter At this point, I am using wikis in all four of my classes: 2 10th-grade Writing Workshop, 1 11th-grade American Literature, and 1 12-th grade elective, Literature of Trauma and Survival. Each class is in groups of 2 or 3, and each group has created themes to guide their pages. Like Anna, I deliberately do not give much instruction about what needs to be on the wiki or what it should look like, and for the most part, the kids respond well to it. My juniors are really uptight and anxious about whether they're doing "the right thing," but I hope that they continue to loosen up as time goes on. Each class works on the wiki one day per week in class, so that they are constantly thinking about how the course texts relate to the given theme and to each other. They have found really interesting connections between characters and between texts. What I think has been most successful is the research the kids have done on their topics outside the books. For instance, the sophomores read The Island of Dr. Moreau, and some groups have gotten fired up about animal rights, cloning, and religion. One of my junior groups has done a bunch of research on political and psychological contexts for their theme, "the pursuit of happiness." Another group in the Am Lit class has included Supreme Court decisions on marriage in their page on "different kinds of love." In the fall, my previous senior elective class created their own grading criteria for the wiki, which sparked a great class discussion about the importance of a webpage's content, appearance, and function. I recommend doing that--I initially did this to take the pressure off me, but it motivated the students to improve their wiki pages, and also got them to buy into the project. My pages are: porterww2009.wikispaces.com porteramlit2009.wikispaces.com portertrauma.wikispaces.com
 * Week 8: April 13, 2009**

Name: Anna Reid Report: With the start of spring break, two sections of III Form students "completed" work on a wiki on Shakespeare's //Henry IV, Part 1// aimed at other high school students. Next year's III Formers will continue work on the wiki.
 * Week 7: March-ish**

This play is not one of the usual suspects for ninth grade English courses. Unlike //Romeo and Juliet// or //Hamlet//, the online resource on this play for this audience are not voluminous. So, the creation of a wiki could prove worthwhile for the students creating it, and it could also be a legitimate resource for a larger audience of high school students and teachers who are interested in the play. Additionally, the theater department would like to produce this play in the next few years, so this could become a resource for the St. Mark's school community.

The evolution of the wiki took place in two stages. First, students were sent on a hunting and gathering mission. They went to other websites, we considered validity of sources, and they worked to format their harvest with attention to uniformity and aesthetics. The second part of the project was to create something new relating to //Henry IV, Part 1.// I purposely gave the student very few parameters for this assignment. Because of this, students created articles with text and images, podcasts, dramatic interpretations, and several other ways to not only show their understanding of the play, but also to illuminate the play in new ways for a larger audience.

To facilitate the podcasts, I started to give a short tutorial on Garage Band in class, but I quickly handed over the reigns to the students in the class who knew the program well. So, I would recommend empowering tech-savvy students to give tutorials on new programs. They are so good at this!

We hosted Matt Chamberlin in our classroom during his visit to St. Mark's. Students asked questions about promoting the wiki, and he was impressed with the wiki's construction, breadth, and depth. He recommended that we visit other discussion boards and wikis that relate to our topic to invite viewers to our wiki. He also encouraged us to enable others to edit the wiki. Students agreed that after they had been graded on their work that they would like to open to the wiki to the world rather than keep the site's authors only those from Room 8 at St. Mark's.

This has been a successful project, and I know that the kids are quite proud of their work. Of course, the wiki is not complete, but isn't completion the antithesis of the wiki spirit? See the wiki at [|reidenglish.wikispaces.com]

Name: Ned Sherrill Report Wikis remain, for me anyway, a little elusive, but I press on!
 * Week 2: Jan. 26-31**

I did ask students in my religion classes to complete a wiki across two sections of students. The subject is Belmont Chapel (our school chapel) and I asked them to look at various paintings, sculpture, stained glass, other symbols and icons, etc. and begin to put together an image of the space from a student perspective and what they could research. I even asked them to upload pictures and provide links to other web sites they found of use in their research. You'll see the results at: http://wildlywiki.wikispaces.com/Belmont+Chapel

I had them indentify themselves with their entries so I could know who was doing what. I was concerned about the font variety but I kind of like the visual flow from one person to the next. It also provides a way for the students to see their work against that of others. this seems to be as far as I have come to date, but now that we are transitioning to a new semester there will be better opportunity to utilize this kind of forum.

Name: Ken Wells Report: I've been trying to get a better handle on what I can do with wikis and how I might use them to enhance the kinds of teaching I'm doing. Here's what I've learned.
 * Week 1: Dec. 8-15**

For my first wiki,(http://electricvehicles.wikispaces.com) I wanted to explore doing a student-to-public thing that would be impossible with our current network tools. Namely, I was wondering if I could reproduce an online version of the experience our students have when they present the St. Mark's solar truck and biodiesel car to the public at energy festivals? Will our students be able interact safely with the public, as the "resident experts"? Well, that was my original intent.....

I was not really prepared for what happened instead - within 48 hours of putting the wiki up, a professional journalist linked his stuff to the wiki and initiated a collaboration with us! (I haven't yet invited my students to the wiki, but I will soon open it up to them, plus all my contacts in the solar car racing community.) You can see how this might be headed if you read the Discussions on the Welcome page.

For wiki number two, I tried setting up student-to-student wiki. I asked my AP Physics class to "publish" their experimental results on a model rocket they are designing. The purpose of this wiki is to document and share info among members of the class who are working on different systems - parachutes, fin shapes, etc. //BTW, this is high-level 'Top Secret' stuff, so promise not to tell anybody! ;-)// If you look at http://kenwells3.wikispaces.com/rocketphysics you can see what the kids were able to put together in the first session. We are still figuring out how this works best for us. You can see that some kids posted their results in the Discussions, while some quickly created entire wiki pages of their own. They had a blast doing it, and produced a lot of material in a 90 minute session. I'm pleased!

A problem I'd love some feedback about is how best to embed graphs, and also drawings and tables from the proprietary CAD programs we use. The Discussion board won't accept Word graphs or tabular data very elegantly, and the proprietary stuff also ends up as a link that comes out as unreadable junk, rather than a read-only copy. "Print to screen" results in platform-dependent garbage as well. (The existing rocket drawing was brute-forced via a Mac screen grab - not a universal solution.)

So my overwhelming first impression: I have been really blown away with how quickly both wikis have acquired content from outside (that is, not from me) sources! You can also tell that the wikis didn't exactly develop the way I originally intended, but quickly are growing legs of their own.