Module 10

Wiki’s:
I had previously seen wiki’s used in another school with great success and have recently experienced a few excellent wiki’s designed by fellow colleagues. After completing the reading in this module I am convinced that wiki’s are an excellent way of sharing and editing information for teachers and students alike. Wiki’s are not only beneficial for professional development uses, as seen in the Web 2 wiki, but also as a tool for monitoring and sharing student work. They also allow you to collect samples of student work very easily.

What role do I see for using Web 2.0 tools (the wiki) in your own life as a learner and in the classroom?

Wiki’s provide a user friendly layout and are a great tool for collecting student work. I can see that they are particularly useful when keeping track of homework and assignments. Another plus is that students can interact with one another and critique each other’s work. Now that I have completed this module, I really need to bite the bullet and get a wiki up and running! I may try one with my yr12 SOR class on Christian Bioethics. I could get them to answer some research questions and then collaborate with each other on them. By the end they would also have a good lot of summary notes.

Nings:

Nings- another platform for creating a social network. I say another, because there seem to be so many social network sites popping up at the moment. I hadn’t heard about Nings before but they look like a good way of creating a social network between like minded individuals.

Thanks to Nick Phillipson’s blog I was able to find an excellent example of a Ning in action- The Floating World. This style of Ning would be a fantastic educational tool for students and the format could be manipulated and used in many subject areas.