Reflection Week 3-wiki
As education continues to move away from standardization and towards customization working collaboratively has been emphasized. I really find wiki a beneficial web 2.0 technology in this area. As Wikipedia noted, “it can be used to work in a collaborative manner for things such as community websites, corporate intranets, knowledge management systems, and note services.” I can really see the benefits of using wiki in the classroom with students and for collaborative use with other teachers.
When I think of wiki in the classroom, at the secondary level, projects come to mind. The wiki page would allow individual groups to collaborate both at school and off site. Access for each member to add, subtract, and edit information would be highly beneficial. The teacher could have access as well to check on each individual group’s progress on their given task. The other benefit would be the ability of group member to add links for others to confirm the quality or need for specific information. From a grading and fidelity standpoint it would also be beneficial. It is very hard to monitor who is actually contributing at times and students in high school generally do not rat out their classmates even if they were forces to do all the work. With teacher access to each individual group’s workspace it would be much easier to confirm the contribution of each individual student. The other thing I could see it used for is in a debate situation where the working groups could fashion and shape their debate collaboratively. Overall I can really see the benefits for use in the classroom both for the student and instructor.
The use of wiki as a collaborative tool for educators is awesome. I have had the opportunity to work with it in this fashion and I thought it was great. I was very impressed with the total contribution of all to complete a truly collaborative document. I really see it as a valuable tool moving forward as a working smarter not harder. The reduction of at school meetings would probably be viewed as a plus for any educator and I believe wiki could be used in this fashion. Here is the situation, you are at a staff meeting and everyone is ready to go and that one hand comes up with a 3 part 5 minute question requiring a 20 minute answer. What if staff meetings were question free and question were addressed on the principal wiki page? Look I am not against questions, but not all things addressed at staff meetings apply to everyone. What about a committee meeting from the comfort of your home as opposed to the schools facilities? As we move forward into this age of funding issues wiki could really be a way of easing some of the extras that go on in schools. Departments could also do their collaboration on wiki as opposed to having to set meeting times. This could make these meetings more fluid and relevant to day to day issues.
Technology is not going away and we as educator need to not only learn to incorporate in our teaching, but also to make the other day to day aspects of teaching better. As the video said, “We are the Web, we are teaching the machine, the machine is us, and the web is linking people.” Let teach it to not only make our profession better, but easier as well.
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