When I had read ”Lära engelska på internet” av Maria Estling Vannestål I sat for hours in front of the computer, and I got lost in cyberspace. I soon realized that I had to decide what my Blog Post would be about. I had great fun though. I asked myself; Is there a way to make it easier for my students to take responsibility for their own learning? I was looking for something that would be a challenge for me, and something that I would have use for in my teaching right away.
I always make my homework on a paper. I try to add some useful links to every homework, but I have noticed that many of my students think it is hard to get to them. So, I went back to the computer searching for information about wikispaces. I had read about it in “Lära engelska på internet” by Maria Estling Vannestål, and I thought it sounded interesting. After gathering information about wikispaces I decided to start a Wikispace for K-12 educators, where I can collect homework, links and other things that my students might find useful when they want to learn more about English. For those of you who like working with Storylines I can strongly recommend reading the article about wikis and storylines on www.multimediabyran.se.
What is a Wikispace for K-12 educators?
It is a wikispace, a space out in the cloud, which you can start for K-12 educational use. K-12 means kindergarten through secondary school. It is free and it is free from advertising. It is a web site, where you can make uppdates directly on the page just by pressing the Edit–button. Wikispaces require access to Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer. From the start you get 2 GB as space usage.
As the space organizer you can choose what kind of accessibility you want your wikispace to have. You can choose between public, protected and private. Public means that the page is completely open, and anyone can edit and make changes to it. Protected means that the page is open to the public to read, but only invited members can make changes and edit it. Private means that the wiki can only been seen and edited by spacemembers.
As the space organizer you can invite and create accounts for all your students, even if they do not have an email. You can also promote members to organizers when ever you need it. You can change look and feel on your wiki by setting colours and theme, and you can uppload a costumlogo.
If you want to create a wiki K-12 you can go to
http://www.wikispaces.com/site/for/teachers.
It can be good to know that you can not change the name of your wikispace once you have named it.
How students and teachers can use it
On a wikipace you can write text, uppload images and files and add links. You can also embed media. When you edit your wiki there is a toolbar that reminds a lot of Microsoft´s Word. Under the Help link you can find many great documents and video tutorials that will help you to find out how to manage your wiki.
I look forward to use my wiki with my students. I can see a lot of possibilities to what it can be used for. I already have in mind to collect reviews and wordlists, from books my students are reading, into the page. We can make videos and add them on the wiki. The page can perhaps work as a ”classportfolio”. Hopefully our wiki will become a natural tool both for me and my students, but to begin with I must learn the basics. I know it will require a lot of patience on my part. One of my problems is that I always want to be able to understand everything immediately. Then it is very easy to seek help from my tech-savvy husband, but not this time. I will take one step at a time, and I will be good at managing the wiki. I have started to collect useful links on the page. Next step is to learn how to change size of pictures I want to add. I have done it before, a long time ago, so it would not be that hard. I just have to remind me how to do it. One thing leads to another, and I am on my way managing my wiki.
I also got curios at “Wikispace for K-12 educators” when I read about it in Vanneståls book “Lära engelska på internet”, and when I heard David talk about it in Lesson 3. After reading your blog about the page I decided to take a closer look at the site.
ReplyDeleteI found it rather amazing, how many different ways you could use the page. I looked at some of the examples of pages that other have done. There where all from simple stories that a class had wrote together to pages where you could learn the most about the human anatomy.
An advantage is that the site is free and there is no advertising at it. Even to me, who no nothing about creating websites, blogs and such things, it seemed rather easy to use; there were small videos with instructions that I found helpful.
As you wrote Evelina you can use it as a page where you can collect homework, links, and other interesting material that your students need in their education as portfolio. I suppose you can share the page with another school and then collaborate in different ways.
But before anyone get in and create their own “wikispace” I think there are some points you should think through close.
· What are your ambitions with the page? Should you use it only for information or will it be a page where the students can work by themselves or together, should it be able to the parents to use?
· Who do you want to reach with this site?
· Who will have the opportunity to publish, should it be free to everyone to publish or only free to read, or should it only be open to your class and perhaps their parents?
· How much time do you have to spend working with the site? Even if it is easy to use, things do not make themselves.
· How do we use it, when there are many students that are not having access to Internet at home? The school were I work is in an area with many immigrants and socially vulnerable people lives there. I know that many has not Internet at home. How much will that limit us in using the page?
When you have considered how to use the site in your class, I think it good to do as your said Evelina. To learn the basic about the page and take it step by step, before you introduce it to your students. Then you can feel a little familiar with it, and you can decide at what level you will use it in the beginning. Probably there will be a lot of suggestions from the pupils how we shall use it. If you know the basic about the page, it will be easier to pick the good suggestions. I suppose you can use it not only in English lessons, you can create “wikis” in almost every subject. So even if I will not get the ability to teach English in the future, I think I will try to make an own “wikispace” if I get a class of my own.