I am in my 5th year of teaching. After attending a technology workshop this summer, I'm testing the waters with a wiki in my classroom. The students will do their second wiki assignment this week.

I teach 6-8 Math and Language Arts. I would like any and all suggestions, words of advice, etc. about wikis.

I am having students sign a contract about the use. I see great potential to use this for the writing processs.

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I incorporated wikispaces into my alternative program last year with positive results. The challenge for students is that the nature of a wiki as a forum for answering questions or telling your answers is that students actually have to think. Hmm....You can use any manner of formats with novels - chapter reviews, connections with settings when a real setting has been "fictionalized" to suit plot, character pages in which character post about themselves and their responses to the events in story, collaborative essays (a page =groups contribution). As for math, I think tutorial pages wold be great. For example, if students used powerpoint/keynote to explain how to solve a y= mx+b problem via balancing or doing/undoing, those presentations could be uploaded to slideshare and then embedded into pages along with text-based narration/explanation on teh page. better yet, have different groups do each element - 1 group performs the visual "tutorial" & uploads it while another is responsible for interpreting the it and conveying the information in text/bullet points of their own.
Take a peek at the work in progress that is my class/program wiki http://northalc.wikispaces.com
Good luck!
Schlegs
try this: inequalities



• you have the students solve some problem
• take a picture of it with a digital camera
•• upload it to the wiki
• record an explanation of the solution audacity
•• upload it to the wiki
• write some text explaining the audio and picture solution.



just an idea.
All good ideas on here! Do the students ever do the explanation? I like that you use it as a resource for your students.
I haven't used wikis in the classroom, but I think they're an excellent tool for a collaborative research report -- which students can add information as they find it and then get together to write the final report :)
My high school son (junior) says that when he was a sophomore, his English teacher used wikispaces.com to generate a class wiki. It worked well in his opinion. The students collaborated on a project relating to Shakespeare's Richard III, organizing and explaining their thoughts. The teacher gave each group a particular assignment to look at (character, theme) and each group made a wiki page that became a resource for the whole class. He says it made the learning more organized and helped him summarize the material (both skills he needs support in); and because it was student generated it was both at his level and added details from many perspectives. The project grew as they moved through reading the play. He adds that only registered users can edit, and that by setting a wiki to private you can protect who accesses the site. I have set up a couple small wikis for classes I have taken, and they work well -- IF you can get participation. Perhaps adults are more tech-phobic, but I had trouble getting people to even participate last summer for a reading workshop we were taking.
I used Wiki's for my 4th grade gifted students. We read books and had book discusssions. I invited the parents to join and even the other teachers. The students really enjoyed that. We also made glogsters,wordles and voicethreads and imbedded them into the wiki. I had my students work in groups of 4 and collaborate. It was great. For Science I had my students do a collaborative project on the Solar System using the Wiki.
How are students accountable for their wiki assignments? Do you give them a number of comments they must post? I like the book discussion idea, if only I taught reading! For the Solar System project, do they create their own wiki or just a page off of the class wiki?
I have been using wikis with my Year 7 class (UK 11-12 year olds) this year. We use one for our Maths class with pages devoted to the various topics we have studied, we have another which is our journals wiki - everybody has a page each (some have more) where they write about their learning.

We will be doing a collaborative project on Mathematicians in the next few weeks, in the past individual groups have created separate resources - this year we can put it all together in a single wiki. Each group of students will have a page in the wiki they are responsible for.

When all are complete they can comment on each others' pages.

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