I am not a librarian...yet. But as an English teacher, I spend a lot of time in the library. One of the projects that I assign to my Core students is designing their own wiki page using Wikispaces (http://www.wikispaces.com/). It replaces the more traditional paper and pencil research paper, but it achieves the same goals. It offers me an opportunity to combine many of my research SOL objectives: I teach students how to determine if sites are reliable, credible, and current; we spend a lot of time discussing how to properly cite online sources (if you have never used http://www.easybib.com/, you MUST check it out!); and students practice summarizing large amounts information. Strangely, students are very familiar with Wikipedia and the idea of wikis, but they don't know how (or why) they exist. In the end, they really enjoy creating wikis, and they learn how to effectively research online.
Below is one of my 2011-2012 student wikis. For this assignment, students were given topics related to Robert C. O'Brien's Z for Zachariah. Students were required to define their topic and then connect its relevance to the novel.
The image to the right is from the book cover.
1 comment:
I am looking forward to learning more about wikispaces over the summer. I have had the same thoughts as your students -- I am familiar with them but I'm unsure of the uses. Thank you for an excellent example of how wikispaces can be used in a classroom over an extended period of time.
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