A wiki for everything and everything in its wiki...

Yesterday was not a good wiki day with my students.  I have said in other places that I tend to jump into new technology and get my feet wet.  I play and explore.  I realized after I launched my students into creating their own wiki pages for science that they had not had ample explore time.

We restarted today and I gave some students mini-tutorials on how to use the wiki.  A few were able to figure things out from my Jing videos and the other helps I had link to the wiki.  Other students appeared to have more ability to adapt to the new thing Mr. G was throwing them into and got right down to work.

It showed me again that kids today are no different than when I was in school.  Some catch on right away to new things and others need more help or some need a little bit of peer tutoring.  I believe this science wiki will work.

Richardson (2010) talks of how a wiki can be a "tailor-made resource" and that is what I have in mind.  I am hoping that the wiki my students create will be be an example to the next class so we can build "reliable  source of information"(Richardson, 2010) that can be used here or any where across the world.

A teachable moment came out of yesterday which I addressed today, plagiarism.  From some of our discussions yesterday they did not understand why they could not just copy and paste.  So, yesterday I added some videos links about plagiarism and one document.  This morning, I went over the information.  Afterwards, one of my kindest, sweetest and most pleasant students approached me and said,
   "Mr. Greenshields, I am a bad student.  Can I edit what I did yesterday?"
   "Yes. Why?" I replied.
   "I am bad, I copied some information," she said.
   "No problem.  You can fix it." I said.
She walked away and looked very relieved.  I love the teachable moment.  At times we strike when the iron is hot and good results come of it.

Here are some good wiki references that I enjoyed looking at:

• http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/home (Check the tools on the left)
• http://comic-life.wikispaces.com/Schools
• http://mslew.wikispaces.com/home (The title alone was worth a look)
• http://educationalwikis.wikispaces.com/Examples+of+educational+wikis
• http://msit.wikispaces.com/home
• http://driscoll-class.wikispaces.com/Study+Skills

• http://youtu.be/Mwbw9KF-ACY(It is not in English.)
• I found it here:
• http://library.stfranciscollege.edu/plagiarism-video.htm

Reference:

Richardson, W. (2010). Wikis Easy Collaboration for All. Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms a multimedia kit for professional development. (pp. 55-69). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press