It seems to me that blogs and wikis are potentially powerful classroom tools. I want to incorporate one or the other but which one? According to Eric’s article, wikis “are easy to use, accessible, and allow students to collaborate on projects both in and outside of class.” Ohhh, I like that. I also like the potential of inviting experts to collaborate with my students – how cool is that?! On the other hand, I have struggled to navigate the wiki for our webtools class. Perhaps a wiki is too complicated for me. Perhaps it is something I need to grow into.
A blog, as Eric states, is “more straightforward.” A classroom blog can be an effective tool for parent communication. It can be a good place to spark a conversation and it can facilitate pre-learning of challenging topics. I don’t see that I could successfully monitor individual blogs for each of my 120-125 students so mine would be a single classroom blog where I would post current events, project descriptions, summaries of course content, or maybe simple discussion prompts. Then my students could respond directly in the comments. The blog seems to be easier to manage but it doesn’t seem to be as versatile as the wiki.
Both blogs and wikis allow participation from a student that is without the pressure that’s found in the classroom setting. A student can research information for his/her responses. A student can write out a response and rewrite until he/she is comfortable with what’s been said and how it’s been stated. Also, these are great tools for ELLs and provide the provide opportunity for differentiation.
I’m not totally sure which I will develop. I’m leaning toward wikis… what I view as the larger challenge with the best potential results. I think I’ll decide tomorrow….
No comments:
Post a Comment