The wiki wave

I find myself riding the wiki wave lately.  I've started using wikis a lot in my classes this semester.  I teach french as a second language and have very small classes, so small in fact that I have to combine three classes into one.  I have a grade 9 Extended French, grade 10 Extended French and grade 11 Core French combination.  The Extended french program starts in grade 5 and has students speaking french for half days until grade 8.  Once they get to high school they have to take 7 credits in French.  As you can guess it's not the largest program.  So I've been forced to combine classes in order to offer them.

That means that I am running two novel studies simultaneously.  The wiki is great, because I've set one up for each novel.  For each chapter the students have to read it and then write two comprehension questions.  Once all of the questions have been posted to the wiki they choose three to answer in the comments section.  This wiki is run through our board's server, which means the students have to logon to access it and this keeps track of who made what changes and comments.  In terms of assessment and evaluation this is very handy.  I can easily scan through, see who was contributed and assess their work accordingly.

In my grade 9 french geography class we are also using a wiki.  Except in this case the wiki is our textbook, and it's the students who are creating the content.  This is the project that is really exciting for me.  This is a different model for teaching.  Instead of the teacher being the sage on the stage, I am their guide.  So far we've talked about higher order thinking and different types of questions.  We've come up with different research strategies and way to get information for the textbook.  Our next step will be to evaluate that info and talk about what should make it into the textbook and what should be left out.  All of this would have been very difficult without the wiki and the iPads.  For this class I have 12 iPads dedicated every day.

The only unfortunate things is that the wiki can't be edited with the iPad.  You can submit comments, but not edit the page.  Luckily I have two desktop computers in my class, so the kids can do their research and prepare their info on the iPads, email it to themselves and then go on the class desktops to edit the wiki.  It's a pain in the butt, but it is what it is.