jen's+wiki+learning+journey

=My wiki learning journey...=

The first part of my learning journey was really brought about through professional discussions about my desire to integrate ICT more effectively into my classroom. Teresa had found out about these things called 'Wikis' and thought we could really get a lot out of them. A short time later, Teresa and I found ourselves in a Multiliteracies PLC discussing the idea of Wiki's in a primary classroom. That night, I thought I would check it out...
 * Once upon a staffroom chat...**

There were so many ways I could integrate a wiki into our classroom learning. I thought of all the tasks we were in the middle of, about to start and all the additional programs I was involved in such as the Junior School Council. Here is my mind map detailing all of these ideas. I thought of a research activity I was already working on with my Grade 5/6 students. We were learning about systems of government and other related topics. I decided that this was the perfect use for our first wiki. Instead of writing a boring old hard copy report they could share their report online. We would make our very own class encyclopedia on Government, world leaders, political issues and systems of government. I set to work at once...
 * The mind starts to wander, and wander, and wander...**

It blew me away! Within minutes of finding [|wikispaces.com] I was staring at the home page of my very first wiki. I was overwhelmed and spent another 10 minutes at least just staring at the home page. Then I took a responsible risk (habit of mind) and played around with some editing. I started by writing an introduction on the home page, telling the kids what the wiki was all about. After playing around for awhile longer I found the 'manage space' section. Here I am able to invite people, give them organiser access, and check out the usage of my wiki. I invited my principal, Teresa...
 * At once her eyes were open...**

Although way past a teachers bedtime, Teresa and I found ourselves up late and online. We were making use of the email feature of the wiki. I had invited her to see my wiki and she started to play around too. Within a very short period I had created a number of new pages based on some question bundling I had done that day with my kids and Teresa had already added a video and some text to these pages. It was amazing. We were engaging in meaningful professional collaboration and creating the work we were discussing simultaneously. It was a great experience and I couldn't wait to share my learning with my students...
 * The long awaited 'AHA' moment...**

The next day I started by showing the kids my wiki home page. We discussed wikipedia and how we could use a wiki in our learning. At first I chose one reading group to formally introduce to the wiki. They created a page for guidelines and another for problems. They quickly came across some issues. The wiki went a bit crazy when more than one person edited the same page at once, so they created communication strategies to avoid this problem. They realised that it could be upsetting when someone changed their entries so they created guidelines focusing on respect and ethics. The students (predictably) took to it like they'd been 'wiki'ing their whole lives!
 * One thing led to another...**

The kids were off and running. On reflection, I realised that introducing the wiki to one group first was based on my own insecurities, not their capabilities. I introduced the other students through reading groups later in the week. By Friday, they were adding to the problems and guidelines pages, and entering their information reports onto the correct pages. They had started discussion forums and were editing each others work. Whilst this was great, it was also a little out of control and unstructured. The wiki was becoming messy so I had a chat to Teresa and we decided on a few ways to teach the kids about effective information reports...
 * Before I could say wiki...**

I had the kids work in three groups. The groups rotated through three information text stations; wikis and websites, text books, and newspapers. Here is a sample of the chart. From their investigations and data we created a venn diagram to clearly show the features shared by all or most informative texts. We spent a few shared writing sessions creating a rubric that we could use to evaluate our own wiki...
 * Breaking down the wiki to ensure success...**

The wiki was taking off and the level of engagement was incredible. The kids were logging on from home and adding to the pages and discussions. They loved it! We still weren't sure of some of the basics though, like uploading photos and documents. I spent time playing and so did the kids. The help desk at wikispaces are incredibly helpful and fast to respond and the discussion forums on their home page are really useful. The kids started noticing that our wiki was not really scoring very high on our own evaluation rubric. We spent some time working in small focus groups to improve the presentation and clarity of our wiki. I tried to match the individual learning focus of the students to the activity. For example, a writing group focusing on particular grammatical structures or spelling would be the editing team for that area of the wiki. It worked well. The text became well structured and sequenced and the information was organised effectively. We learned how to upload pictures and documents...
 * Back to Basics...**

We knew there were so many other uses for a wiki. I was really wanting to play around with digital portfolios, but I wasn't happy with the styles I had seen and I didn't have the technical skills to make a new style. The wiki changed that. We have started this term with a whole class "learning journey". We decided to call it a learning journey because many of the kids had an out of date idea of what a folio was all about. We wanted to make sure that our learning journey was a living document where we could reflect on our term's learning. Teresa taught me how to do a story map of our inquiry.
 * We still wanted more...**

I created a wiki page plan that could be used by the kids when developing our learning journey wiki. I then made a page for each stage of our learning journey (shown above) on our new 56dlearning wiki. I modelled how to use the wiki page plan in a writing introduction and then assigned a page to each small group of 3-4 students. They did it really well and within the same hour, they were on the internet building their pages. The best bit of this was that all abilities had an entry point. Some students had simple 3-4 sentence page introductions, while others had pictures and documents uploaded as their evidence.
 * The hard copy became digital...**