Once again, Kathy Fredrick brings us a common-sense approach to Web 2.0 in her latest article for School Library Media Activities Monthly, “Wiki-World.” Kathy outlines some of the ways in which school library media center could use a wiki for:
- student book reviews
- collaborative research
- “exhibition space” for student work
- student-created pathfinders with annotations on a research topic
- common space for collecting research data
- student forum for metacognitive discussions on the research process.
Be sure to check out the inside cover for more details and ideas on using wikis.
Though I was once able to nimbly make HTML pages from scratch, those days are behind me, and wikis have been an easy way to quickly assemble content. It’s been a humdinger of a week, one in which I used wikis in these ways:
- We created a new Battle of the Books wiki using PBWiki after Seedwiki’s new interface gave us some trouble. (Our colleagues across town had made a crackerjack Battle of the Books wiki last year, and ours was modeled on theirs. We had tried a blog to capture student thinking about the books but preferred our colleagues’ wiki approach!) We discovered two new features that we really liked about PBWiki:
- the new visual editor and layout are really soothing and easy to use;
- PBWiki is the only free wiki I could find that requires a password for editing, helping to protect our students’ work;
- the free wiki lets you check a box when logging in to request that all wiki changes be emailed to you. They arrive in your in-box color coded according to what has changed. (In my desktop Outlook client, anyway. In Web-based Outlook, no color-coding appeared.)
- I made a new PBWiki for a department meeting to capture our thinking about Library 2.0 being a transition from traditional activities to more digital activities, but with the same values underpinning it. This time, since I was the person registering, I got a couple of friendly emails suggesting strategies and tips for using it.
- Hope you’ll drop by this one and give your Library 2.0 feedback!
- I checked in on two wikis I maintain for professional development, our district technology wiki and the Podcasting at School wiki (which is a companion to my upcoming book, Podcasting at School). Both were made with Seedwiki last year, before the site upgraded and ran into a few problems. I really loved Seedwiki last year because it was so straightforward and am hoping the glitches will be worked out soon.
- I run a Mock Caldecott contest each year and started to keep a list of which titles interest me.
- Our school hosted Judy Hauser of Oakland Schools (our local intermediate school district) for an evening presentation called Web 2.0 for Parents. We posted her links to a wiki. (In this case, I wasn’t using a wiki to collaborate with others, but just as a super-quick way to copy and paste her links from a Word document into a Web format.)
- And … in preparation for a presentation on technology and habits of mind I’m making tomorrow to Marcia Mardis’ class at Wayne State University, I posted those links on the wiki as well to make their navigation go more quickly and accurately.
As you can see, I’m a wiki fan. And tired!
