Light at the end of the tunnel

Just want to let everyone know that I am seriously looking forward to the end of this semester. Although I've learned a lot in all of our classes, I am so ready to be done.

I'm glad we learned about wiki's and we have decided to do a wiki on the American colonies in my class. We are using Blackboard to do the wiki and it is a little more difficult to use than the tool we used in our technology class but it's okay. I'm certain the kids will really like it.

Everyone post your digital stories to the wiki.

Wikis

Well, I see that I posted on the wrong topic so let me begin again.

Wikis....

I can easily see how they can be used in a classroom. I can see my students using a wiki for several purposes. One way I think they could be used is by assigning groups of students to create a wiki on a particular topic and having the other students respond to it. For example, for the Colonies, one group of students could be responsible for creating a wiki page or subpage on Plymouth and they would have to research Plymouth and put information out there for others in there class to learn from. Another group could do Jamestown, etc.

I also like the idea of students doing research to contribute to a wiki that already exists on wikipedia. I think that would help students realize they can contribute to something that others use while simultaneaously showing them that "anybody" can change the wiki so everyone must be critical of the information available on a wikipedia site.

My experience with Photo Story 3

So, although our digital story isn't due for a while, almost as soon as I learned about the tool, I had a use for it. We are learning about inferring in class and I had already selected a story to discuss.

Pyramus and Thisbe is a story very much like Romeo and Juliet. Pyramus erroneously infers that his love has been killed so he kills himself. In the written story, the reader knows what happens while it's happening. In the digital story I made, I omitted details that would allow the students to easily recognize what happened. Instead, they were left inferring why he killed himself and why Thisbe wasn't where she was supposed to meet Pyramus.

I taught the lesson today and the students were so interested they couldn't wait to get their hands on the written story to see what really happened. The tool is really easy to use too. I can see our students using it to create oral reports in history or language arts.