My First Experience With A Wiki

http://techsource2.wikispaces.com/

This was my first experience with a Wiki. I was a bit nervous about having my grade dependent on others in my group. Although my experience with Walden students has been a wonderful collaboration of ideas so far, I have had non favorable experiences with other teachers to compete tasks. The book Blogs, Wiki, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson was very helpful. Chapter 4 put my mind at ease by giving good explanations and helpful online Wiki samples. I feel our group was very enthusiastic about working together. It was a pleasant assignment because our members were willing to contribute their knowledge. Very quickly we knew there had to be one person to start the ball rolling. Questions by group members were responded to in a timely fashion. Once we were all given equal access, everyone starting posting and changing the Wiki. We started out having discussions on the application section, then once the Wiki was up and running we changed to the discussions within the Wiki. The one thing that I might change would be the time frame. In one week we had enough time to get established and an additional week would give us more time to perfect the finish product.

Group one http://techgroupone.wikispaces.com had a very colorful home page that did not have a large description of teachers. I like the apples as their rating system. I thought that group 3 http://usefulwebsites.wikispaces.com did a wonderful job of teacher descriptions and had fantastic pictures and graphics. The rating system of the stars was another great visual for group 3. I have already added all three wiki groups to my google reader so that I can go to the sites listed. This is a true time saver for blogs to read and gain valuable information.

To teach the process of creating a Wiki to my students I would say that the most helpful piece would be the navigation and editing tools. I would give my students some practice before having them work on a class Wiki. There would be class parameters that would include a rubric that contained the basics for only posting your own information. The class would be able to edit other students and change the layout or add pictures to contribute to the Wiki. I feel it would also be important to show students that if they accidentally highlighted and erased someones entry, how to recover it. It would be a true collaboration via the internet.