I can certainly see the application of using both blogs and wikis in my own classroom. I could see integrating a blog requirement in my high school science courses that would serve as a great way to collaborate or simply ask a question. Requiring each student to make a few posts over the course of a unit could be extremely beneficial. I could see students helping students a lot more using a method, the internet, which they love. I would also incorporate and require students to fill out a form that summarizes their blog posts and comments to other students. Minimally, the grading rubric would include questions like, “Did I make write a post that raised an original question or issue stemming from the reading, lab, and/or homework assignment for this unit?” I would then ask students to provide the title, date and a one sentence summary of their post. See the attached form for my “Blog Self-Assessment” Rubric.
As far as a class wiki, I don’t see myself incorporating a classroom wiki in the near future. I can see the benefit for using a class wiki for a virtual learning experience. I watched the youtube video posted by Gordon that includes a teacher explaining how her students collaborate using a wiki in order to write an essay. All the while I was thinking why not just use Google Docs? For those teachers that are already using a wiki for something like a group essay, what is the benefit over using Google Docs?
Requiring either web tool could prove to be discriminatory. As some of my students don’t even have a computer at home, making a requirement that involves the internet could serve to be a hardship or challenge for some. I may need to provide in class time for such a requirement. Or maybe when I help them set up their blog accounts, I could ask them to fill out a simple technology survey. From the survey, I should know who may have limited access to the internet. For these students, I could provide them a one-day-a-week pass to my seminar (a 25 minute “homeroom” of sorts that falls in the middle of the day).
The attachment is linked in my next post. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteAs part of my final project I'm going to survey the students too. Find out their computer access (though since we have tons of computers on campus we pretty much assume they have access), what kind of web tools do the use, etc. I'll check out your rubric, great idea!
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