Brief update. It's going well and I'll add y'all soon. You'll get an invite from PBWiki. Give 'em a password and log on. After you're done, make sure you log OFF, then go BACK to PBWiki and log in again (trust me). The first screen after your password screen, make sure you click on the pulldown bar that says somethin' like UPDATES. Click on the NEVER. Otherwise you'll get a thousand updates, and that will make you very sad. And angry. Mostly angry.
The kids are updating daily, and I'm spending about an hour each night looking through theirs and making comments. I'm careful not to tell them how they should do theirs. I'm letting them come up with everything on their own.
A4 class was given the job to figure out how we'll do our WORKS CITED. I don't want them to have to do them like their TT assignments (as I mentioned in previous update), but they also need to learn that they have to give credit when they borrow things. I've checked out their examples and we'll talk about it tomorrow (Thursday 2/14).
I haven't put together their rubric, but I have all the info. And on that note, I found that I focused TOO MUCH on the wikis the last 1.5 weeks. I haven't focused the students' attention on...say...OUR CLASS AND OUR WORK IN THE CLASS. That changed this week. We're back to reading (The Odyssey, my favorite old dead literature) and they don't have any time in class to work on it. Next week each class will get 30 minutes to go into the computer lab to work on them. I'll highlight the goods and the (very few) who haven't done much on them.
Already the kids are having a tough time organizing, and that makes me a hap hap happy boy! They're slowing figuring out how to organize their pages, and I hope this transfers over to their next TT assignment.
Also, I'm getting some great and intriguing stories here. Really! Captivating ones. To this extent, I hope their papers have more voice, more personality to them.
We'll see. Hi hi hi!
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Hey John,
I'm impressed that you're looking at all of the wikis on a daily basis. I designed my research so that it could be monitored vis rss primarily. If I were to continue the research into the next phase then I would need to look more at the quality rather than quantity of work.
How has the citing been going?
Now that the students know how to use the wikis you should consider setting all "wiki work" as homework. After all, once they know how to use the wiki software, they're no reason to collaborate via a wiki if they're sitting in the same room together.
If you have time, it would be great if you could post a couple of paragraphs from stories that are exceptional... exceptional work is so hard to find.
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