User:White Eagle/Math Project1.1

Wiki Editing with Students

Overview

By the end of the school year 2006/2007 I launched a project on wiki editing in mathematics in my two grade 11 classes 11B (26 students) and 11C (11 students).
Tey are of age 17 to 19.

I was for me the first experience like this with students.

Set up

• 1) I introduced the students to the WikiEd project and to wiki editing (ca. 10 minutes)
• 2) I informed them about the possibility to upload a mathematical problem and its solution to the internet, on a site that is expected to have many visitors in some years.
• 3) I told them about my expectation, that every working group should chose a problem out of the subject matter (curve analysis) of this school year, solve it and edit it.
• 4) I promised to link the best produced pages to my user page with positive comment.
• 5) The time given was about 7 school units (a 45 minutes).
• 6) Our school has 2 "computer rooms" a 17 working places each. I did the necessary reservations.
• 7) I gave out two tasks:
  • A) Create your own User Page and set a link to your project page, a sub page of your User Page.
  • B) Pose a mathematical problem and solve it, edit it to the wiki.

Pedagogic

• 1) During the project I went constantly from one working group to the next, discussing with them, helping and encouraging.
• 2) After every 3 units, I made a plenary meeting with beamer and showed and discussed the actual results.
• 3) I created a link from my user page to a list of all student accounts and showed it to the classes. I told them about the possibility to interact with each other.

Observations

• 1) The students had no problems in creating an account and editing their User Page. Typing skills were often very good as students are used to the computer, mostly for leisure activities.
• 2) About 70 percent of the students got active.
• 3) About 2/3 of all active students took the project for serious and tried to achieve good quality, the others were looking for fun, mostly producing trashy content or trying to surf to youtube or game pages (forbidden).

One student managed to copy a relevant text out of the German Wikipedia and put it with a personal introduction on his user page. He ignored the licensing issue.

• 4) Some had remarkable pre-knowledge, finding it easy to upload and integrate a picture and even a mathematical graph, produced with an external tool.
• 5) Some groups tried to edit a formula with the LaTEX formula generator, but found it too difficult and quit the idea.
• 6) One girl edited her project page (80 times!) from at home.
• 7) Those working seriously seemed to be delighted by their work.
• 8) Groups did nearly not interact at all via the wiki.
• 9) Students had some problems with using English, but some knew about the online dictionary Leo.org and used it. Others followed. And: In mathematics not much text has to be edited.

Results

The best results can be examined here:
First place: User:Annlex , 11C
Second place: User:Lena.kohl , 11B
Third place: User:ViKey, 11C

An actual list of all student accounts can be found here.

Feedbacks by students

At the end of the project I had a written, anonymous opinion poll in each class.
Afterward I read the given statements to the whole class and we discussed it in public.

Class 11C was completely in favor of the project. They were grateful for the new web experience and wanted to have still more of it.
They nearly all have internet connection at home and one stated, he would like to continue editing in holidays.
I told them about my vision to accompany the whole tuition for one year by wiki student editing, and all were ready to support this idea.

In the other class standpoints varied.
Some appreciated the insight into wiki editing provided by the project, others found it boring and useless.
It is obvious that those who got active themselves found the work positive, those who did not really participate were negative.

All in all, about more than the half of all 37 students gave positive feedback.

Conclusion: In this age group I can see great potential for work within a wiki.

Conclusion

• For myself: Good experience. I'll try this again next school year, but as regular part of my tuition, including assessment.
• For the students: Interesting new experience for those who got actively involved in the project.
• For WikiEd: This page will be listed in the Teacher Education Project Ted. We need broad experience about wiki editing of free educational materials. Student editing is one way of creating useful and relevant content.

Remark: Please feel free to leave a commentary on the discussion page. Thanks for participating to all active students and to all readers for their interest.

--White Eagle 12:18, 23 July 2007 (CEST)