Who else knows about wikispaces?

Tonight, I taught my first lessons as part of an intensive English workshop for local Ann Arbor students, whose parents believe nine months of regular schooling is not enough to prepare their children for whatever ends ;) With 90-minute instructional periods, it is important for teachers to consider two things: breaks and varied activities. The first point of consideration takes little to defend, and I think most teachers in block-scheduling environments incorporate at least five minutes or so for students to relax and stretch halfway through the class period. The second recommendation, however, I think very few teachers actually consider. In both of my 90-minute periods, I changed topics and modes of instruction at least seven times, and both sets of students could not believe the end of the hour had arrived when it did. When teachers take the time to meaningfully consider natural breaks in instruction and appropriate transitions from one topic to the next, students tend to become more engaged in conversation and less focused on the minute hand.

Shortly after introductions and reviewing the outline of the courses, I took my students across the hall to the computer lab. Each class participated in a jigsaw where half of them researched one topic and the other half researched another topic. Using Wikispaces, I created a quick, clean classroom website this afternoon for both of my sections, and with links already posted to the wiki pages, students wasted less time searching the internet for fruitful resources. Although I eventually intend to use the classroom website as a real wiki with students contributing content, I currently have them all believing (or excellently pretending to believe) that the website is an unchangeable electronic document. When I was reading the website address aloud for all the students to type one character at a time, a 10-year-old boy finished the URL by asking, “Is this a wikispace?” Now, I did not know about Wikispaces until last summer, so how is it possible that a fourth grader knows about it? I will tell you how – because Web 2.0 grows faster than any of us edubloggers know.

Future educators, I implore you to learn about how we can use various Web 2.0 tools in our classrooms to enable students to work with us in constructing knowledge.


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Image Citations:

Clock. Retrieved on June 17, 2008, from http://blog.wolfram.com/images/carlson/clock.gif
Wikispaces. Retrieved on June 17, 2008, from http://www.classroom20wiki.com/space/showimage/wikispaces.png