5 Mar 09 Wiki? What's a Wiki?

Blog 5 March 2009

Wiki? What’s a Wiki?

This was a refrain I heard from students and staff as I tried to explain what I wanted them to do with my new classroom wiki. Some folks had heard of Wikopedia, but most were confused. I tried to explain it.

I uses the wiki-ness of my wiki to edit each one, yet again. I decided to add annotations to each. Over the weekend, I read all of the Black Eyed Susan picture books and created a plan for reading them to the school. I know only a few lucky classes will get to hear them all because of the snow day and because of MSA schedule. Anyway, the annotations were easy because I had a CD of the books and there were some annotations there. I just copied and pasted. The few picture books with none, I wrote quickly myself. The picture book ones are about a sentence or two long. The novels are quite a bit longer. Not every font was the same when I did the copy and paste thing or wrote my own annotations. I do not know how to fix that. I hope the reviewers don’t mind.

I found a student who had read three of the novels and I wanted her to be my wiki guinea pig. I invited her in on Tuesday, sat her down at the computer, and went right to the wiki. I explained what I wanted her to do. She selected the book she wanted to comment on. We clicked on the discussion part. She could not discuss. I did not know how to add her> I must have been on bus duty when that was gone over. I went to Susan and Wendy for help. Wendy set me straight.

I took the girl into Wendy’s room after school and Wendy showed me how to manage the wiki to add the names. Now this is going to be time consuming, since there are 510 students who go to this school. I decided to see who else had read three novels. I did a copy history on each book and printed out a list. I found only one other student who matched my first as in the number of books read. I added her as well. Both girls came into the media center yesterday, and I explained what I wanted them to do and how to do it. One girl wrote a lot. The other girl wrote a little. They took about 10 minutes to do their work. They were excited to post and want to come again today to write about another book.

Meanwhile, one third grade class has decided that they want to check out Black Eyed Susan novels because they too want to post. I checked out five books over the past two days for them. I asked them to read it quickly, so that other student could also read the books. A student from yesterday already returned the book. She wants to post too. I learned when I added her four-letter name to the list of guests, I needed to have six or more letters for her. I added her short last name and that fixed it.

I think to manage how students are doing their commenting, I will open it up for before school, at recess, and after school. I hope I get more than three commenters.