Yay Class Wiki!

On Tuesday wikispaces.com approved my request for an upgrade to a free Plus account for K-12 teachers. This made my wiki ad-free (although I think it already was), and allowed me to set up accounts for my fifth-grade students without needing to submit email addresses for them. I set the accounts up very easily on Tuesday night (just by making a two-column spreadsheet of usernames and passwords and then following a few easy and well-guided steps), and on Wednesday I introduced my students to the wiki. They used it in class to work on editing the myth puppet show scripts that they have been writing in small groups. That went very well.

Then, today (Friday) one of my students mentioned that she had, on her own initiative, gone on to the wiki from home and continued working on her group's script in the evening. Wow! Yay!!! That's exactly the sort of thing that I was hoping would happen, but I never expected it to happen so soon or so spontaneously!

A wiki really turns out to be the perfect tool for this particular project. Groups had already written a first (and in some cases second) draft of their scripts, and most were already typed up. It was easy to upload the ones that were already typed, and easy for me to type in the ones that weren't. I found the editor a little bit annoying when working on the ones that had been uploaded from pre-existing files -- the cursor often jumped to a different place than where I wanted it when I would first start editing a page. The kids haven't complained about this at all, though, so either it isn't happening as much as I'd thought, or it isn't bothering them enough to mention to me.

The wiki is not only a good collaborative tool for this group writing project, it's also a great management tool. Before, I had folders (the manila kind, riding around in my backpack every day) full of script drafts. Some had been typed at school, some by me at my house, and some by kids at their houses. It was hard to keep track of which script was at which stage of editing, and hard to figure out how we were ever going to find time to finish the project. I thought about putting all of the files into the Shared folder on our school's server, which would also have collected them in a central place and allowed all of the kids and me to access them freely -- but only at school. I don't have that kind of time at school, to type in drafts and check students' editing -- I only have time to do that in the evenings and on weekends. And, YAY again, the wiki allows me to do just that, while also allowing the students to access and work on their files easily from school or home!

I typed up instructions for accessing the wiki and editing pages, and had each child glue them inside his / her homework planner. That's working great -- they've brought the planners to the school library, computer lab, and mini-lab, both with and without me, and easily followed those instructions to use the wiki.

One of my groups (actually it's kind of amazing that it's just one, at this age) has had some conflicts around two different kids really wanting to own their group's story. One useful "safety" feature of the wiki is that with the Show Page History option, if they ever argue over who's made what changes to their story and whether or not that's fair I'll be able to track that information down very easily.

(After all of the scripts are done, students are going to make or find background scenery either in KidPix or by drawing their own and scanning it into the computer. They'll use KidPix Slideshow to record their scripts, so that they can concentrate fully on manipulating their marionettes during the actual performance. For the performance, we'll lower the Smartboard (or whatever it's called) screen in the Computer Lab as far as it goes, and project the background scenery onto it. The stage is a refrigerator box (that size, anyway), which will be in front of the screen and covered with a black sheet. The kids will stand on chairs on either side of the box to manipulate their puppets. Hopefully we'll then film the whole thing, and I'll be able to post it on the wiki. We'll just have to be careful not to film the puppeteers themselves, in the couple of cases where parents haven't given permission for their kids' pictures to be posted.)


What's next for the class wiki after this project? I'm thinking of trying a "Choose Your Own Adventure"-style book with my kids, on the wiki (sort of like a hypertext book)! I've been doing a paper version of this project with kids for years, off-and-on. It's a high-interest project that the kids love. I'm thinking that on the wiki it could be pretty free-form, with each student adding as much or as little as he/she wishes since the need for tight pre-planning is so much less than with a pencil-and-paper version. I could use it for practice writing and punctuating dialogue if I make it a requirement to include some dialogue on each page of the story. Or I could do the same things with adverbs, or with strong verbs, or multi-sensory descriptions. Then, kids who are interested could experiment with me to find ways of using different tools to illustrate or add sound to some of the pages. This could be a very cool next project! :-)

P.S. - I tried to make the title of this post link to my class wiki page. I'm not sure if it will work. If it does and you choose to follow the link, please explore beyond the first page (which is nothing much, right now) to the Myths Project page, where the kids are working on their scripts. It still won't look like much, but there's lots of great student work going on, there!