Thing 9

Wiki Wiki Wiki
I'm learning new things every day. I love it that a wiki wiki is Hawaiian for quick. Now I can say quick and Merry Christmas in Hawaiian!
I'm a librarian so I've been sceptical of Wiki's. I don't think we're super fans of Wikipedia due to the fact that the information is everchanging and might not be accurate. At the same time, I've used it and been happy with what I've found. Last year I took a college class through Aquinas and the whole class was built around using a wiki. I was scared at first since this was new to me but I quickly realized that it was easy to use and very apprpriate for our assignments. We often worked in groups and could each fill in our own pieces of the puzzle to creat one document. Then, we would read other projects from other groups and respond to them. The teacher could then read all of them and send our grades to us privately. It worked really well and I felt that I was a new world college student.
I looked at Roc Wiki - a site for city of Rochester New York. I thought it was well organized and informative. Like most wiki's (I think) you have to sign in in order to make changes so that would help with just any Joe editing for no reason. Then, I moved over to MAME (Michigan Association for Media in Education) at the MAME Booklist site. It wasn't very good because there just wasn't enough in there. Also, when they did give a list of books, I would have liked to click on the titles, get an annotation and maybe see a link to the author. I think the problem is that not enough people have contributed to the site. The AASL (American Association for School Librarians) was much better. Time was spent on it's content but I didn't think that it was all that clear of a site. I would have added more subject headings and lists.
I can see many uses to Wiki's in our schools. English classes could write stories and the kids could keep adding to the plot. Science teachers could have groups create a plan for labs they do weekly where the kids could make lists of needed supplies and they could enter repsonses of what they discovered. A social studies group could add similarites and differences to all the countries of Africa and add links to where they found their information. I would like to see many of our staff use a wiki to create an assignment. A couple of years ago, I created a book review blog. It wasn't required for students to write them so it just kind of fizzled out. Perhaps I could redo this as a wiki and see where it leads.
I found a Lee Lefever video on You tube and loved his camping trip example. I'm going to share that with others.