Week 7, #17

The amazing talents of librarians are evident everywhere and the wiki entries were no exception. In the sandbox are of the CSLA 2.0 wiki, I found enough workable ideas for my school's curricula to fill an entire school year. Some were ideas I have considered and others were ones I should have thought about! My entry was past item 50. I was impressed that people were able to devise so many different ideas. My favorites included the history of the town and the battle of the books (even though we don't do that I could see its use in book reviews elsewhere).

My students created a wiki in world cultures class during a unit on Japan. The students love wikipedia so we decided to make our own for one country. This was a project using two classes that met at different times and never worked F2F. Each pair received a topic from the unit. First they had to create a list of 10 essential facts with sources. Then they submitted a draft essay. Next they posted the essay. They then received a second topic, one which had previously been assigned to someone else. They did a fact sheet for their second topic. After that, they edited the essay on their second topic, an essay that had already been posted to the wiki. Students then added multi-media to the wiki. At the end, the students submitted a reflection on the wiki process, including their feelings on peer editing/being edited. All of this was spread over the course of the Japan unit. I would definitely make changes in the process, especially to resolve some tech issues we had that caused essays to disappear! You can't do this with large numbers of classes at a time because you have to correct a fair number of essays in a quick turnaround. This is the idea that I will post in the Curriculum Connections area.