Sunday, January 27, 2008

Thing #15

There was a comment in the SLJ article Ten Reasons Why Your Next Pathfinder Should be a Wiki that caught my eye. "If not for my pathfinders, my e-books and my databases would go unused!"(Joyce Valenza)  Wow!  How many times have we said "There is so much information available to MISD teachers and students through the databases but many don't even know it's there ." Navigating the MISD databases can be overwhelming to the inexperienced but wikis are user friendly. Providing easy access to information in the databases is enough reason in itself to create wikis. But since wikis allow any number of people to contribute, it is also a great way to collaborate with teachers. One of the major obstacles to collaborating with teachers is finding the time to get together and discuss the lesson components. A wiki is a work in progress that can allow for collaboration to take place as the wiki is developed thus saving time. 
The Wetpaint site lists several reasons to use wikis in education. It suggests using wikis to communicate with parents and post assignments. It is disappointing that their ad-free education wikis only apply to secondary schools. I think that elementary students could benefit from the use of wikis as well. 

2 comments:

Debbie said...

That's a great idea to use wiki's as another access point for the databases. We need to be thinking about going to the users instead of assuming they will come to us.

learninglou said...

You idea of using a wiki to collaborate with teachers caught my eye and seems like one we certainly could use in our busy lives. Thanks for sharing it.