Saturday, July 11, 2015

To Blog or to Wiki...

...that is the question!

I chose to respond to Lankshear and Knobel’s chapter 5 this week on blogs and wikis.  I was familiar with blogs from years past but never had my own until recently.  However, I was not familiar with wikis, other than Wikipedia obviously, so that was interesting to read about.  One idea/buzz word kept coming up in the chapter and in my head, collaboration.  For those of you that aren’t teachers, collaboration is the new (sometimes seems like the only) buzzword in education.  Everything is about collaboration.

While I was reading, I kept thinking of new ways I could use blogs or wikis in my classroom to better collaborate.  I already have it in my head that I want to create classroom blog next school year where students can share their ideas or reading responses.  But a blog might not be as collaborative as a wiki.  When I finished the chapter, it became apparent that a wiki space would be better for collaboration within my classroom than a blog, but harder to set up.  Lankshear and Knobel state, “Wikis have great potential within education for promoting online and offline collaboration among educators and students within and across classrooms and institutions” (p. 158).  My only concern with a wiki is will it be too complicated to navigate for 8 year olds??

Honestly, because I am not as familiar with wikis and because Lanskhear and Knobel say ‘setting up and contributing to a wiki is not as straightforward as setting up or posting to a blog’ (p. 158) I feel a classroom blog is the safer option for this coming school year.  However, Lankshear and Knobel do say that wikis ‘have considerable potential as a professional development medium for educators, as tools, resource hosts, and shared interest spaces’ (p. 158).  So maybe the answer here is stick with a simpler blog for 3rd graders in the classroom and create a wiki space for teachers to use and collaborate together. 

My goal for this fall is to help classroom teachers better incorporate technology into their classrooms, we are even setting up a new committee to make this happen.  I created an edWeb space last semester to help make my goal a reality, but the problem with edWeb is you have to create an account and login every time.  A wiki space might be more useful so more than one teacher can contribute to the content or edit an existing entry to make it better.  It might also be easier to navigate or get to for the resistant to change teachers, we all have a few of those at our schools!

Side note: I did a basic search on wiki.com for "technology AND elementary education" and a really cool wiki showed up.  This is a great starting point for me to use to help teachers next year realize the importance of technology in the classroom! 

The only concern I have with incorporating a blog or wiki into my classroom is the lack of technology available to some of my students outside the classroom.  I would love more than anything to assign homework where students have to blog or contribute, edit or read a wiki, but the reality is most of my students don’t have a computer or internet access at home.  I will just have to be diligent about allowing students the time in the classroom to participate if they aren’t able to at home. 

image taken from a Google image search


References:
Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2011). New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning. New York: Open University Press.

11 comments:

  1. Hi Emily,

    Thank you for your thoughtful blog post, it is very refreshing to see your understanding and care about students outside of the classroom and their accessibility to resources. Coming from a first generation background I wish some of my teachers would have understood these kinds of issues growing up. However, I definitely do not feel you should let accessibility to resources stop you from promoting blogs or wikis. In some ways I feel that may even be a disservice to the students, regardless students will have to learn how to use technology and being introduced younger is better. Now, I do not know how your school’s resources work, but would it be possible to incorporate the uses of wikis, blogs, and technology during class? I am not too familiar with K-12, but would be interested to hear what you have to say!

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    1. Hi There,
      Thanks for your response. I definitely utilize technology as much as I can in the classroom, I have 4 computers and I got 6 iPads through Donor's Choose. So they are still learning as much as I can allow them time for in the classroom and I encourage the ones with access at home to do as much as they can too! It is hard and there is a fine line. I am always looking for new apps or ways for my kids to be involved in the classroom and am constantly trying new things. It is so important, especially with all this testing now online, I have to prepare them as best I can!

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    2. Hi There,
      Thanks for your response. I definitely utilize technology as much as I can in the classroom, I have 4 computers and I got 6 iPads through Donor's Choose. So they are still learning as much as I can allow them time for in the classroom and I encourage the ones with access at home to do as much as they can too! It is hard and there is a fine line. I am always looking for new apps or ways for my kids to be involved in the classroom and am constantly trying new things. It is so important, especially with all this testing now online, I have to prepare them as best I can!

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  2. Hey Emily,
    I like that you are looking toward trying to incorporate more technology into the classroom. You mentioned possibly starting a wiki with educators so I have a question. If I were a part of that wiki how would I know that someone has edited something? For example, if there is a segment about something, I read it, and then a day later someone changes something, would I notice? Would I have to read the entire excerpt again to see that or do you get some sort of notifications?

    As you can tell... I know very little and have zero experience with wikis so I was curious :)

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    1. Hi Erin,
      So you bring up interesting questions and to be totally honest, I have no idea! I have never used a wiki before so it would all be very new. I am assuming you could subscribe to notifications like you can on a blog when someone comments?? Wikis are new to me and I have never explored them until today so I will let you know :)

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    2. Hi Erin,
      So you bring up interesting questions and to be totally honest, I have no idea! I have never used a wiki before so it would all be very new. I am assuming you could subscribe to notifications like you can on a blog when someone comments?? Wikis are new to me and I have never explored them until today so I will let you know :)

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  3. Why do you think collaboration has been talked about so much in the education field now? I really liked being able to read through the flow of thoughts in your head of how you would create a wiki for your students. You seem to have a good grasp on your expectations with the projects. Can I ask why you decided to pursue your Masters and where you plan on going with it?

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  4. There is a lot of research these days that says kids learn better in mixed groups with their peers and it is especially helpful for the English language learners. I remember in school sitting in rows and not talking to peers. Now in order to push critical thinking and get more voices heard in the classroom, kids always talk to each other before answering a question. I like it better!

    My masters is in curriculum and instruction with a technology emphasis (I think that's the name of it). As of now I want to stay where I am in the classroom but maybe down the road I would like to be a technology specials teacher (like art or PE) and teach kids digital citizenship, keyboarding, blogging, research, etc. Right now, in my district, technology jobs aren't long term or a sure thing so we'll see!

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  5. Hi Emily-
    I enjoyed reading your post.
    Edweb must be a resource for finding and sharing resources for lessons and lesson plan ideas.
    When I read about wikis, I still think of Wikipedia (more for research and referencing).
    Would a wiki be better than a blog for the classroom because of its collaborative potential? How would you use it in the classroom?

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    1. edWeb is like an education Facebook, easiest way to describe it. There are a lot of resources and webinars that are usually free. I don't know enough about wikis yet to know how I would use them in the classroom. I just know what I read in L&K and how they kept going back to collaboration which is what I like to focus on in my room

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