Wiki What-What? The Trials of Thing 8

I am familiar with Wikipedia; truthfully, who isn't familiar with Wikipedia? Next to using Google as an educational search engine, students use wiki as their source for most information, whether that info is accurate or not. Mostly, I appreciate Wikipedia for its service as a jumping off point to other sources, which is, I suppose, what the point of it is. Some of the entries are very well written, while others not so much. But all of them have a list of links to further your education on a point. Sadly, I think my students don't use those links, but take the info on the page at face value.

Anyway, as I searched through some of the wikis linked to the 23things page, I was at first completely overwhelmed. I guess I was expecting something more like Wikipedia, including the Encyclopedia set up. Instead I was bombarded with too much extraneous stuff on the page, or at times, a lack of obvious student work.

I took notes on my whiteboard while perusing some sites; the first few I checked, I was not really thrilled with, including the first high school one, the wolfden, which I thought sounded interesting. When I got there, I wasn't sure what exactly to be looking for, so I just browsed. But there was so much, and then some of it was just links with no explanation where they went. I wasn't sure how to check for what the students did, and then, thinking like a high school student myself, I got tired of thinking about what I should be doing and moved on to another page.

Code Blue seemed like a good idea, but not really very inviting, just a list of links to other sites with no explanations really. While it is a good base of knowledge, I wondered how much of the knowledge listed was actually digested by the students (pardon the pun). Donning my high school thinking cap, I decided I could very easily find a site dealing with my topic, link it to the page, and go off and surf or go to facebook or wherever I wanted to spend my time. I'm just not sure the kids who put it together actually learned anything.

So I thought I would visit some lower grade sites just to see how they were doing. The School Then and Now site seems to contain information that the kids gathered themselves, maybe by interviewing family members or neighbors. The listings are organized somewhat, but still not necessarily attractive or attention getting. But I can see that the kids were more involved in putting it together. The learning and skills were more obvious to me, and got me thinking back to Coolcat teacher's blog where she listed off what she was having the kids do. With that information, I could see how one would go about constructing a wiki properly because she states that kids have to summarize what they are reading to put on the page, not just link to the page they are supposed to be reading. At least with this step, you know your students are getting some of the information and not just slapping links on a page to get a grade. She had more tasks, and I will keep those tasks in mind when I start constructing my own wiki lesson.

Another site I really liked was a third grade site which, for whatever reason, I found attractive; it was easy to follow and had the voice of the kids about it. Hard to explain and I'm not making myself clear, but the page was easy to follow; the links on the side were not just other pages about the topic, but pages created by the kids, complete with recipes, maps, and student produced art work. The images borrowed from the web were cited with links so visitors could go straight to the source. I liked this site, but is it a wiki or a collaborative website?

I think maybe I am having a semantic issue.

Maybe I am thinking about wikis in the wrong way. When I used a wiki in my class last year, we were compiling ideas based on research the students had done over decades and the western. They had to be familiar with their decade before they could answer the wiki needs. The nice thing was that because they could see the other students' posting, they could comment on those other ideas. My wiki didn't look like these, but it was called a wiki on the moodle, so I assume it was.

Maybe I'm confused by what looks to be entire class websites, not just wikis. There are so many tabs on some of them they seem like an actual sites, not just wikis. Or is an entire site able to be referred to as a wiki?

I would like to have my kids this year compile information about the Greco / Roman myths and, in their own words, make a database over the basic stuff we should know about the gods, goddesses, and major heroes / tales. I don't want just links to this information; I want the information already digested and compiled for quick reference when reading other works that will inevitably allude to all these myths. Links to other sites would be fine, but I want thumbnail sketches that make the information quick and easier to digest. I think I can create the basics for this on GoogleApps Collaborative Spreadsheet. Perhaps there is then a spot on my moodle to turn it into a more organized form accessible to all the students for whenever they need to access it.

So is there a wiki in my future? Most definitely. I just have to figure out how to make it happen the way I want it to happen and in the time frame I need it to happen.