I have talked about the versatility of wikis in many of my posts and have often blogged about how we have been using them here at school as a portal for classroom lessons, for digital portfolios, for online projects and for information gathering and collecting.
Last year we trialled having our students in Year 7 & 8 create their digital portfolio using a personal wiki. This has worked really well and this year we are continuing to process with students in Years 7-10.
Now this week we have taken our wiki digital portfolio program one step further by requiring our teachers to create their own wiki as a personal digital portfolio. This is part of their Performance and Development process. This involves teachers reflecting on their professional practice, setting goals for themselves while working in a collaborative and supportive team environment. Our teachers here at Wedderburn College each belong to a P&D team each lead by a leading teacher in the school. Once a term they meet to share with their team their goals for the term and their professional development plans. We thought that this year we would have teachers put these ideas into their own wikifolio which would be structured in the same way as the students are . The sections are Being an Individual, Thinking and Learning, Working in Teams, Contributing to the community and Setting and Achieving Goals.
By having teachers use their wiki as the recording vehicle for their reflections I hope that they will also learn more about the way wikis and other Web 2.0 applications work. It also opens up more possibilities for recording and publishing experiences in the classroom for their P&D reflections. I have my first meeting with my team on Thursday and I am really looking forward to seeing what has been recorded so far.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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3 comments:
Mrs. Anne Baird,
I am a new member and I enjoyed reading your blogs about how you are incorporating new technology such as wikis into your curriculum. I am a college student at Illinois State University and we are actually learning how to use wiki as part of a teacher education class. The course I am taking revolves around new technology that can be used in the classroom once we students become teachers. Wikispaces is one of the more interesting programs that we've used in my opinion. It is very versatile and can be used in just about any classroom. In addition, Wikispaces is more interesting and way more advanced then other programs such as powerpoint. Some of the things that I have seen done with wikis is very engaging and I think that it will keep students attention better in the classroom because it is more engaging than older methods.
Similar to the project of your students making portfolios online, we are making videos to demonstrate our own research combined with what we've learned about the education system in the United States. I think it's very cool to see that students in a different part of the U.S. are using Wikispaces for similar projects.
I look forward to seeing how the wiki turns out for your group.
Alex
thanks for your message. It is so heartening to hear that preservice training for teachers is taking into account the value of many of the web2.0 applications out there. You are right about the versatility of wikis. I think that is what is so good about them..they don't have too many bells and whistles that might distract students but they have the flexibility to provide many ways to collaborate, share, publish and provoke comment. Are you going to post your videos on the web? It would be very interesting to see your views of what you experience in US schools.
Anne,
I really like that your school has been using blogs and now are using wiki. When I was in high school we didn’t have any technology like that. I only now understand any of these new techniques because I have been using them in a course at my college. I find them a great tool for many different possibilities.
The idea of making teachers create there own in interesting. Having a mentor in your field, through wiki, to guide you through you goals. Is this a college wide thing? Is it being used in every field throughout Wedderburn or just your subject?
My thought is just to the high schools. If we could have used this new technology with blogs, online discussions, and wikis we would have saved a lot of wasted class time. Yet also, there would be more out of class, online work.
-Heather
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