3 comments

  1. Can you give some examples of what kinds of activities/assignments represented that “A-ha moment”?

    1. The “A-ha” moment is likely different for each person, and each learner, but for me it came after two years of using wikis to have students publish. They had spent lots of time publishing content, and working individually on their own pages, and not truly collaborating. I was basically using it as a glorified digital bulletin board.

      It wasn’t until I gave them partners from different classes, and opened up the assignment so that the creation of content happened on the wiki, not off of it, that I truly understood how powerful the collaborative piece was. They created their own Kid friendly version of Wikipedia, building up entries through the day and week with students that they otherwise never would have interacted with because they were in different classrooms. They finally had a great reason to use the discussion feature of the wiki, and had to carefully weigh the benefits and drawbacks of editing someone else’s work.

      I’ve seen other teachers that I work with had the “A-ha” moment when using a wiki as a digital notebook, where small groups of students could post resources and materials on the same wiki page that they all needed for some final project. I’ve also seen students creating fiction together through a collaborative writing project, as well as a class notebook for sharing learning experiences and important details about a unit.

      You could most likely apply the “digital notebook” idea to any subject or grade level, and have kids working together in very little time, as long as you had proper guidelines for how to document what the students were gathering.

Comments are closed.