wikipedias

I think I may have been bitten by the “wiki” bug because I do enjoy our class page. I like the description of a wiki as a “living organism” as put by the Richardson chapter. Although I still have my reservations. When I taught high school in ’07, I told my seniors that they absolutely could not use wikipedia for research in my International Studies class. First, I felt that they needed to have practice doing research because they were a year away from college and wikipedia was not what I had in mind. I’m sure wikipedia is fairly accurate but I wanted them to at least attempt to use some primary source documents. I like what the chapter had to say when it suggested that a student’s excellent research paper could be added to wikipedia for its content. That I could get into.

I tried to log into a couple of wikis suggested by the chapter. The wiki on Alex Rodriguez impressed me, because even though the language wasn’t “proper” (the author used ferschizzle) it had personality. More importantly, you could tell that the author, a sophomore boy, was passionate about his subject and it got him writing. The planet math wiki seemed like an invaluable resource for teachers. According to Richardson it is “a virtual community which aims to help make mathematical knowledge more accessible.” I think if I were to use wikis in elementary school I would definitely do a password-protected one. There are many options and the ones I liked best were the what-I-did-this-summer wikis, sixth grade wikis, book report and poetry wikis. I could easily imagine an elementary school class doing one of these and getting really excited about it.