PBWiki Ideas...

This one is too good not to share!

PBWiki is a site that will give teachers a free wiki. A wiki is a shared website in which multiple people can contribute to the content being worked on. Wikipedia is the best known of the wikis.

Karen M. was saying that she wanted to use more technology this year. I'm all for that. Karen is always full of meaningful ideas that make the content more meaningful for the students.

About a week ago Karen and I signed up for a wiki (it takes a whopping 30 seconds or so to do it). She had a great idea for her literature groups. Sequencing and main ideas are important concepts in the grade 3 curriculum...as well as grade 4 and 5. Karen's idea was for the students to create and maintain a wiki page as they read their story. They would be required to find and list important events in their story. They were required to keep a list of events in the story.

Here is where is gets good....they could only keep a limited number. They just couldn't record each and every event. They had to list only the most important. So after a number of chapters were read the students listed 20 events that happened in the story. Then the students had to read a few more chapters, record the events, and then update the wiki. The students couldn't go over 20 events so now they have to start evaluating the importance of the events in terms of the story. If you recall, Bloom held "evaluation" in very high regard :) So with each revisiting of the list the students have to review the current list and decide what to keep, delete, and add.

I know Karen is still working thru the project, because as a student updates that wikis it automatically emails their changes. I'm not sure how the project is going since I haven't talk to Karen about it since she started, but the idea is so great I just had to share.

The district is in the process of putting up the own wiki, but I don't feel like you have to wait for us....grab a PBwiki for the time being and start posting....give your kids a real audience to write for.

http://pbwiki.com/education.wiki