Technology Medley

Our school division superintendant, Dr. Alan Seibert, will soon join a group of educators who will be traveling through India and visiting schools there. Earlier this fall, he asked teachers who might be interested in doing some collaborative projects to contact him, and Tina Coffey and I then met with him to discuss ways we could facilitate those projects using technology. Thus, Trek 2 India was born!

We created this wiki to help teachers and students follow along with Dr. Seibert on his journey as well as to provide a place for him to share his pictures, videos, and stories. But, as usual we had an ulterior motive! We wanted this to be an example of a way you could incorporate wikis into your curriculum.

What is a wiki? Well, wiki is a Hawaiian word for quick or fast, so a wiki is a quick (and easy) way to create a web page. It can be edited from any computer with an internet connection, and once people join, they can edit the wiki, thus making it a true collaborative project.

Two of the most widely used wikis in education are wikispaces and pbwiki. Students can use wikis for collaborative projects on any unit in social studies or science, or to share reflections on books, or favorite authors….and the cool thing is, those projects will remain on the web for the students to use for review when testing time rolls around in the spring!

You can create simple wikis with just text and links, and that would be awesome! Also, if you take a look around the Trek 2 India wiki, you’ll notice that we also used several “embedded” objects. That means that these objects are actually stored on other web sites and are pulled in when you click on the page. (It’s easy to do! Just ask!)

You might be interested in using some of these yourself! Check out these sites that we used:

• Glogster (poster site – home page)
• VoiceThreads
• Google Maps
• Flickr
• Weather Underground
• Wikipedia (several images from here)
• ClockLink
• Dumpr (fun image editing site)

You can also upload pictures, videos, and podcasts directly into your wikispaces site. If you do set up a wiki for your class, be sure to take advantage of the ad free sites being offered to educators by wikispaces.