Using wikis in high schools

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My original reason for getting involved in working with wikieducator was to explore ways in which students and staff can utilise wikis within out learning management system - a virtual learning environment pretty much in its infancy. I've developed the obvious "lesson" and tried to include some collaboration and sharing of ideas. I am hopeful that other science teachers may find it a useful resource and perhaps modify and improve the lesson. That's more than I could have hoped for if it were a resource built within the LMS. I am about to facilitate a professional development program in which some teacher's explore and develop the LMS and hope they will think about wikis, develop their skills and use them in some different ways. This will take place over the next few months so we shall see. Stay in touch if you are interested. Some Maths teachers will be involved - I've tried to get a cross section of faculties represented in the program.

By the way, great progress on your wiki skills!--Robin 09:02, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Robin Kirkham (talk)22:02, 1 July 2009

Hi Robin. I'm back. I've found that students are reluctant to contribute to the discussions (forums) of the LMS. I'm hoping to improve that this year as we move to moodle from a commercial system. My requirement last year was that each student post at least 1 substantive study or homework question and 1 answer on each 4.5 week forum. This year I plan to start off with something totally non-threatening -- how do we reasonably share 100 loaves of bread--looking for the charitable options, not the math. Then, I think I'll move to a less structured, but still required, math forum. I'm still investigating moodle's capabilities on this, so we'll see how it goes.

BTW--Thanks for the comment -- I'm back to learning again.

Ellenbush (talk)01:56, 31 July 2009

Since my last post, I have had a bit of a breakthrough in my own science clases. I have set up groups and given each group a page on the LMS. This includes a wiki in which they record their progress. All groups have access to each other's work. Each group makes a presentation based on the work on their page. The themes were chosen by students around the broad theme of Global Change. Each group had to prepare stuff around between 1 and 3 learning objectives ie this is what they were trying to teach the rest of the class (including me) through their presentation.

This basically formed the assessment for a 4 week Global Change unit in Year 10 Science.

I enjoyed being able to track and comment on student's work between classes. The students liked creating materials in their own page and being able to assemble knowledge from a wide range of sources. Most found relevant YouTube materials and there were lots of good images and slides. Students are now carrying out peer group evaluation based on how much they think they learned from each other's presentations.

This is all facilitated quickly and easily using ICT - I could not have done this using conventional paper based methods--Robin 09:51, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Robin Kirkham (talk)22:51, 14 September 2009