Ways to Use Wikis with My Students?

I was trying to think of ways I could use wikis with my students more during the coming school year.  I found this great site for educational uses of wikis.  This site breaks down educational uses for wikis by subject area and even gives great ideas for use with younger students. Another very useful site is all about using blogs and wikis in education.  It provides some great information as well as resources for effective uses of wikis in education.

A lot of math teachers in my school do math challenges for their students.  Some teachers have a challenge question for each unit where students can submit an answer one time and get an extra credit point if they are correct.  Some of the other teachers have challenge questions that they change each week and allow students to earn homework passes for "x" number of correct weekly challenges.  I was thinking that using a wiki would be a great way for other teachers as well as myself to allow students to solve math challenges or even other contests or questions.

I decided to create a page on my wiki (Technology at NTES) called Technology Trivia.  I set up a June trivia question on the Technology Trivia page.  It was my hope that students would be able to go to this page on my wiki and be able to comment on my postings with their response to the trivia questions.  I was hoping to use a feature where I could set the comments to not post for everyone to view until I approve them for viewing.  This would be the best way to avoid correct responses from students being copied by other students that could view comments.  Then I could also have the ability to make comments viewable by all after the trivia question for the month was over. 

After much research on the PBworks site I found out that I would have to pay to upgrade my account to have the comment feature I was hoping for.  I don't think educationally I can justify spending the money on this wiki when it would at the moment just be for answering fun trivia questions.  Instead, I decided to modify my wiki to have a link for my email so students can email me with their name, teacher's name, and answer to the question. 

Below you can see a picture of my Technology Trivia page that has been set up for students for the month of June.  Unfortunately with my free account from PBworks I cannot make this page public for viewing.  If you want to view the page you can request access from me when you click on my link.

Keep and Share

Keep and Share is a free online site for filesharing.  Through this site you can store and share any type of file from any computer. It allows you to decide which files are private and which are public for others to view.

Below is a quick view of the Keep and Share dashboard on their site.

My 5th graders have been creating PowerPoint presentation about moving on to middle school and their fifth grade farewell.  The students have been working very hard on these presentations and of course want to take home their work.  In the past, I have saved all of the PowerPoints to CDs for the students.  This is expensive and time consuming since there are 122 fifth graders at my school. 

I created a Keep and Share account to see if there would be a way for me to upload the student PowerPoints and share them with an individual link for the students to access them at home.  It was very quick and easy to upload the PowerPoint to the site.  I have set it to public view so that you can view a student PowerPoint that was uploaded to this site.

So far I am very pleased with this site and I plan on uploading the other student PowerPoints later this week.  I think this site would be great for sharing and publishing student work from school.  This site will also allow parents and students to view their work outside of school.  This site could also be helpful for sharing homework assignments or documents from in class with students.  If a student was absent, a teacher could upload their missed work to the site, set it to be viewed only by that student/parent, and give them the web address for the activity.

I think I may also use this site for use with the staff at my school when we need to share large files that are taking up space on our school's shared drive. 

Can Filesharing Save Me Time?

As the technology integration teacher, technology liaison, and head of the technology committee at my school, I find myself constantly creating tutorials for teachers on setting up email, printing to the OCE, creating graphs in Excel, etc.  I usually use screenshots inserted into a Word document along with text for teachers to print and follow.  Many teachers love these tutorials but some other teachers have said they would do better if they could see and hear directions instead.

I heard about the filesharing technology called Jing from a fellow technology liaison and decided to check it out.  It is a free program that can be download by both Windows and Mac users.  It allows the user to create screenshots of the computer screen as well as video of the onscreen actions with audio recordings.  The program then creates a link to the screencast to be viewed by others.

A great tutorial I found all about Jing can be found on the TeacherLink site by clicking here.

I thought Jing might be a great tool to use with staff at my school for computer questions that come up year after year.  If this works well with teachers, I am hoping to use it with my students.  This seems like it would be great for use with students that come late to class and miss the demonstration or for students that need directions broken down step-by-step and repeated.

Below is the link to my first screencast I created for teachers:

Setting up Microsoft Outlook for the first time

There are many other filesharing sites that I am hoping to check out in the next week.  A helpful blog I am using to decide which software to investigate further is ProCasts.  This blog walks you through all types of topics related to screencasting such as choosing your software, how to export screencasts, and much more.

Student Use of Google Docs

After using Google docs during my graduate class last summer I realized how easy it would be to use this with students.  I decided to try Google docs with a 5th grade class to peer review their classmates' writing pieces.

We used the Google account I created for my school and students were able to upload their writing pieces they had written in their classroom.  Once students had uploaded their writing pieces, we were able to create a link where students could access the work and peer review their classmates' work without logging into a Google account of their own.  Students were assigned to peer review two different writing pieces for students in their class.  I showed students how they could use the "comment" feature to identify and changes they thought should be made to the document.  By using this feature they would not have to alter the student's current work.  They were also able to use this feature to give praise or suggestions to the student.

Below is a picture of one of the student's peer reviewed writing pieces.

I think using Google docs to peer review student work is working really well.  After students used the created link to view and edit student work, we then changed the link to allow access to only read the documents.  By using this link we are going to be able to share the writing pieces with parents, teachers, or others that do not even have a Google account.

The link below will allow you to view one of the peer reviewed writing pieces.
https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1pvU3GkAa0OG_WXxWnSOxDzdSRu1vSBVg87lWhSrRvUM&hl=en&pli=1#

I am hoping to get teachers involved in using Google docs for student writing pieces as well as things like science fair.  Students have deadlines for different parts of their science fair projects like question and hypothesis, procedure, data tables, etc.  Right now teachers have students turn in a hard copy of each of these items, they make comments on the paper, and then return the papers back to students for revision.  If we could use Google docs as an option for students to get feedback on their science fair projects, I believe it would save a lot of time and make things a little easier for both teachers and students. 

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Google docs is a free online tool that will allow you to create or upload documents, spreadsheets, and presentation online.  You can share your documents with others and multiple users can be editing the document in real time.

Google spreadsheets are similar to using Microsoft Excel but with all the extra features of sharing and real time collaboration.  At my school we use Excel to create spreadsheets of student unit test scores for both reading and math.  All classroom teachers must type in student test scores for each unit test.  When one teacher is adding their data, no other teachers can access the spreadsheet to make changes, only as a read-only file.  I created a Google account for my school in the hopes that next year we can put these spreadsheets online so that multiple teachers can add their data at the same time.  Obviously this spreadsheet would only be viewable by the staff members to ensure student privacy.  Another great benefit of creating our school spreadsheets online would be that teachers could add and edit data from home or another location since they would not need to access our school's shared drive in order to access the spreadsheet.

Google has a great guide to help you get started with creating spreadsheets: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=20322&topic=20329

One of the greatest features of using Google docs or Google spreadsheets is that you can access your documents from any computer with an Internet connection.

I used Google docs last summer during a graduate course at Loyola.  My group and I were trying to work on a research paper together and we were trying to figure out the best way to keep each other updated on changes we were making to the paper.  There were four of us in the group so we felt that it would be too hard to just email the document back and forth as there was a good chance that someone would end up making changes to an older version of the document.  We decided to use Google docs to share the research paper so that we could all be making changes anytime and we would all be able to view the most recently updated changes through Google docs.

Below are a picture and a link showing my shared document from last summer's course.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AQ6wRJBaZEIBZGRoNTloNnBfMWRmdHE1N3hz&hl=en&pli=1


The Google website also provides an entire section for educators about how to use Google docs in your classroom.

del.icio.us: A Social Bookmarking Site

One of the social bookmarking sites I had checked out was del.icio.us. del.icio.us has many great features that make starting an account with a social bookmarking site seamless.  If you are one of those people that has a huge list of favorites on your computer, del.icio.us allows you to simply import your bookmarks directly to your del.icio.us account.

One of the teachers on my technology committee had used this site in one of her graduate classes at Goucher and really wanted to share the site with the school's technology committee.  I created an account for myself through the use of my previous Yahoo account.

I started adding some bookmarks for sites I use daily at work like my school's wiki, BCPS Intranet, Assesstrax, STARS, and a few other sites that are primarily only useful to myself or other teachers in BCPS.  I set these links as private as I did not see the need for many others to use these in their classrooms.  The next thing I did was to add some bookmarks for the sites I use with my kindergarten classes when they are learning about patterns.  I chose to make these sites public so others could search for them.  A great feature I found on the del.icio.us website when adding these sites was that I could "share" these bookmarks with other people that had del.icio.us accounts.  I think this tool will be very useful for me to use to share sites with teachers in my building.  I am hoping that this will make things easier for the teachers in my building because they will not have to add sites to their accounts that I have already uploaded and shared with them.

Here is a quick view of my del.icio.us bookmarks page.

When I have some time, my next plan is to start uploading the massive amount of bookmarks I have saved on a few different computers at my school.

If you're interested in getting more information about the del.icio.us site, a helpful resource I found is at: http://personal.strath.ac.uk/d.d.muir/Delicious1_2.pdf

Click here if you are interested in checking out my del.icio.us bookmarks.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites are a great way for people to share, organize, search, and manage their web sites.  In the past when a worthwhile web site was found, one would have to save it to your favorites in Internet Explorer or another web browser.  There was no easy way to access these "favorites" from a different computer or to quickly and easily share your bookmarked sites with friends and colleagues.

Now with the use of social bookmarking sites, one can access saved Internet resources and also share them with others.  You can even decide whether you would like your sites to be available to the public through searches or to remain private.

Social bookmarking sites could be used in the classroom for teachers as well as with students.  These sites can be used for something as simple as managing web sites for different curricular units.  If a teacher was going to teach a unit about weather, they could add the websites they've found that are useful for this unit and tag them with the word weather so they could easily be viewed when searching.  Teachers could also use the search feature on a social bookmarking site to help them find useful resources for the units they are teaching.  Teachers and students could access these bookmarks from any computer at school, at home, at a library, or from any computer with Internet access.  Social bookmarking sites also allow students to collaborate with other students as well as teachers.  Students can share their bookmarks that they have found to be worthwhile with their classmates.

There are many social bookmarking sites available and they are free of charge.  Some of the sites that are not blocked by the BCPS filter are: digg, reddit, del.icio.us, and diigo.  One social bookmarking site I found, edutagger, is geared specifically for K-12 educators.