Recently Kids Need to Read blogged an article on the wiki-wire work we did through the high school with the students building the lexicon for The Softwire Series by PJ Haarsma. PJ works closely with Denise & Sherri with Jim Blasingame, but I’m excited from the line that reads “this is what great teaching is all about – combining challenging, creative thinking with resources that drive kids’ passion”; I am honored to be grouped with PJ Haarsma as two visionary teachers who fight to find new ways to engage our students. Here’s a link to the article (with pictures!).

Here’s a link to an article written about the Wikiwire presentation last night. A nice shot of my student and some information I presented on Social Media and collective intelligence.

I’ve always been under the impression that students appreciated getting due dates well in advance so they can plan ahead. I know parents appreciate deadlines way in advance. About six weeks ago now we gave an assignment to make a WIKI for class. I think my biggest mistake was not making stuff due all along. Like weekly. Of course, part of that was not wanting to grade it weekly. The wiki is due tomorrow, and tonight EVERYONE is working on it. Not a week ago. Not a month ago. Tonight. Some kids haven’t logged in since the day I asked them make an account. Now they are all logged in. Frantically trying to finish their work. Frustrated. Freaked out. Ugh. I also gave them full collaborative access to the rubric so they could add their “two cents”. Out of 80 kids, probably a dozen bothered looking at it. Next project, they get ONE DAY notice, since that’s all they use anyway.

In late spring a couple of up and coming students were working on a project where they needed to post something online. I just required these students to create GMAIL accounts, so I suggested Google Pages. Google Pages is a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) web page editor. This is free and built into Google APPS, so I figured it would work out pretty well for her.

So let me talk to you a little about what worked and what didn’t work so far in Google Pages. If you need to make some simple webpages or you don’t need anything too fancy, then go for it. If you don’t mind structured webpages with little freedom, then this will work ok for you. For example, I use to use Microsoft Publisher for webpages (yes, I admit that!) and it was so rigid, and Google Pages is like that. That student met with me during conference time and we worked on her website together, and I couldn’t believe how little control the user actually had (no matter which theme we chose). If you’re looking for quick and dirty, go ahead though.

Also, recently we see that Google Sites come online, and I’d like to point out a few differences. Google Sites has a wiki base to it, and for the layperson, steer clear at first. No luddites here. Albeit, if you understand the collaboration strategies in Google Docs, go for it! That’s how their “wiki” works, which is cool for those who’ve used Google Docs for awhile. A colleague of mine just made a site on teacherweb.com, and I wanted to bang my head against the wall because I’d been converting her over to Google Apps. Then she makes a rigid, ugly site. It’s not her fault, and it’s difficult to discuss that with her, but I wish I’d been asked beforehand.

After school today we had a meeting about summer reading. In our district, we cannot really call it “Summer Reading” so we make it due 2-3 weeks into the school year. This really isn’t feasible anymore given all of the higher ed institutions who require summer reading for incoming freshman. Ladies & Gentlemen, get with the program. How do we keep minds fresh and continue to learn if we don’t require our students to use them? When was the last time you didn’t read something over breaks? Come on. Give me a break! Seriously, our district believes breaks are breaks. No work. Now this is an issue for me, a life long learner who reads voraciously (this past weekend I read the 464 page Change of Heart by Picoult), and how do we model this good behavior for our students if we tell them to just shut down over summers. No work. Just veg out. Ha! Not me! So we had a meeting about books today. I will admit I have never read Cry, the Beloved Country. But I need to. We picked it for our AP Language summer fiction read, but Ron Bromund and I realized that that book wouldn’t work for American Studies, so Ron came up with a new book: Jeff Shaara’s Rise to Rebellion, which floored me. I read several reviews, and I loved what I saw. I immediately talked with a colleague who read this book while walking the Minute Man Trail outside Concord. I bought it after school.

…. ok I think I rambled enough. I will get to the title of this email. Wikipedia. The last four years my perspective when it came to my students was DO NOT USE WIKIPEDIA. If my students cited it, they got a zero on that. It was a do and die situation. Last year I began to realize perhaps the students who began there and went off to other places was ok. Then today, someone in our meeting asked if we should put a note on the summer reading instructions that says no Wikipedia. I didn’t believe I did it, but I stopped them right there. Um… Wikipedia isn’t the best source (I can write that Abraham Lincoln is our school football coach if I want!), but if you go there and scroll down, then use the citations and links to get elsewhere, then fine. Use it. Ugh. I said it. Wikipedia isn’t evil. It’s a good repository.