Reflection #3 - Wikis

Reflection blog #3 - Wiki Week!


I created a wiki for teachers to share technology ideas and create a community to help each other enhance lesson engagement with today's digital native students. Teachers have a 30 minutes lunch window, conference time, and staff development days together, which is rarely enough time to discuss ideas. This wiki will allow teachers to share ideas and success stories at their convenience and others to read at a time that is comvenient to them.

Wikis are a great way for a group to communicate and build upon each others ideas. If something worked for one person and did not for another, they can share those stories. Not only technology, but they can share strategies or any other tool that came accross as exciting to their students.

Since I am student teaching, I have shared my wiki with my mentor teacher. I will ask him to share with the other teachers in the CTE dept. I am excited to see what kind of reaction the other teachers have to the wiki and this type of communcation. I hope they see how this can enhance their own classroom and share ideas.

The advantage of wikis is simply the ease of communication and ability to share information quickly and at your convenience. The disadvantage is simply not using the wiki and for some the new technology may be overwheming. I remember the first time I signed on to facebook and I thought it was a different language compared to the ease of myspace. Until you have actually used a tool several times, it can be scary and not seem to be worth your while since you do not understand how to navigate the system yet. However, just as I learned to use facebook, we can all learn to use new tools and as teachers we should always continue to learn, especially new technology!

I am looking forward to the day that I can set up a wiki for my own classroom! I believe that a wiki would be a great way to communicate between the teacher and student. I would be able to post lesson information and share different tools and references for the students to utilize both in the classroom and from home. Everything on the wiki is public, and that would be great to share with parents as well. Parents would be able to see lesson directions from home and help their child or post a comment or quesitons that I could reply to online. I think that the open communication is an obvious advantage.