Tag Archives: wiki

Lessons & Units

Teach A Teacher (Mac Edition)

This unit starts with assumption that students are better at ICT than teachers, and that the teachers at your school need help. Students work individually but collaboratively to learn about various aspects of the Mac (both hardware and software). This information is then used to populate a pre-structured wiki, essentially creating an online manual for others to use. At the end of the unit, students need to work with a partner to line up a two-on-one session where they help a teacher to improve their ICT skills by using the wiki. I recently ran this unit simultaneously with 60 11-12 year old Y7 students, and they adapted to the collaborative nature of the wiki fantastically. At the end of the unit, when they had all taught their teachers, I received excellent feedback on their performance from my colleagues. It also got them really thinking and talking about the computers they use every day, and what they can do with them.

The material below should be all that you need to deliver this unit at your school:

Other Resources

Project Gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is an online repository of books that are out of copyright, and thus freely available for anyone to use. With over 30,000 books currently available, this site provides a great source for gratis reading material. However, more important than this, it provides a massive amount of text that can be mashed and remixed in any way you or your students can dream up. Free from the constraints of copyright, and available in unfettered digital form, why not try some of the following ideas:

  • Use Wordle to create fantastic word clouds, which can be used to pick out themes or learn vocab.
  • Give students part of a text and ask them to write an extension or introduction to it.
  • Take a famous novel and come up with some crazy alternative endings.
  • Use Flickr Storm (free photos) and Storybird (digital storytelling) to create a picturebook version of a text.
  • Work as a class to produce an audio version of a book, publish it with Creative Commons and give it away on the web.
  • Take a novel and remix it into a song, poem, play or game.

I am sure there are at least a hundred other uses for Project Gutenberg’s texts. Let me know if you can think of any, and I will include them in this list.

My Resources, PD

Creating A Digital Hub: Website Creation for Teachers

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Recently I have been fielding questions from pre-service teachers regarding setting up their own website to support teaching and learning. I usually point people to a wiki (www.wikispaces.com ) or blog (www.onsugar.com ) service as a starting point, and show them how to integrate content from other sites and services. The video below aims to answer such questions in a thorough, easy-to-follow manner, so that teachers can help themselves.

Prior to watching the video it is worth noting that it deals with the creation of a wiki , but that the same principles can be applied to a blog. Many people are unclear on the distinctions between these two types of website: in general, a wiki is a relatively unstructured site that can be easily contributed to by a number of users, whereas a blog is a chronoligcal journal maintained by a single users. If you wish to develop a site that you alone run and others read, then a blog may be a better choice. However, if you want to invite other teachers or students to collaborate, a wiki may be a better option. Some sites, such as this one, blend elements of the two, and there are other structures which, for simplicity’s sake, we will not consider here. Your choice now determines what you can and cannot do with your site in the future, so it is worth considering.

Other Resources

Wikipedia

http://wikipedia.org/

A giant; world-wide collaborative encyclopedia . Often criticised because anyone can edit it; but most people miss the point that this is what makes it so great. Shunned as a tool for student research, it does in fact make an excellent starting point, with articles that are usually up-to-date, well researched, accurate and comprehensive. It also provides a great vehicle for students to practice skills  of information literacy. Students can be asked to consider questions such as “What is the truth?”, “What is a reliable source?”, “Should we trust what we read?”, “How can we use references to decide if a source is reliable?”. Further, by having students contribute to Wikipedia, they can learn to appreciate their own knowledge, learn to work with others, and value being part of something bigger. I believe there is a nobility behind the Wikipedia concept that many people simply fail to see.

As all of the content on Wikipedia is licensed under a Creative Commons license, it is a great source for text and images that students can edit in the course of their learning and teachers can edit in the course of their teaching. As once example, there are many high quality maps on Wikipedia, which can be freely edited and incorporated into teaching resources.