Beyond+Video+Clips

Wikis and More

This presentation will share how wikis, and other tools can be used in a variety of engaging activities. Recently my students completed a unit on China. I will share how this unit was created and developed collaboratively by the students and myself.

ChinaElco Project

Session Notes: The wiki pages were set up in advance of the students accessing it. This saved time and made for easier navigation as this was the first time most of the students worked with a wiki.

Students were required to work in groups, collaborate and do the research of the topic to cover the desired objectives. The instructor started with developing essential questions and then divided these questions into "jobs" for the students. The wiki space was then developed with separate pages for Instructions, Resources, and each of the jobs were easy to navigate between on the wiki.

Despite the title of this presentation, Brad explained that he planned to keep things simple and concentrate on talking about Wikis. He took the request to present today as a challenge to create a quality activity for his students.

On the page for his project (linked above) he has an introduction, instructions for doing the project and then pages for each of the "jobs" that the project required with questions to lead the students into their work. He also provided some resources to try to help limit what students would have to sift through in order to do the project.

After having the students complete the individual parts of the project, he utilized the Discussion feature of the Wiki page in order to have them teach each other about what they'd learned. He mentioned that the students didn't even realize that they were doing that as they responded to his discussion question.

This really seems like it was a well orchestrated project in which teacher, coach, and students worked together to create a quality project. The linked wiki space really speaks for itself. Please check it out! Thanks, Brad! Great presentation!