I am HAPPY! I hope you are too.

Going to keep this short because I only have 2 hours to check out all my wikis so I don't want to spend all my time yacking on here. I'll talk on here another time, i want to spend mucho time on the wikis so the students know I'm serious about it.

Some short points: I have ALMOST all my students fill out the survey form. A couple didn't. Boo.

PBWiki has lots of cool toys but I found that many have ad links for stupid spam MySpace crap sites. I emailed them and they apologized but said it's the deal they have with the widget people. So that sucks. I talked to all my classes about it and my kids have found ways to put the chat program on the site without ads (I have some crackerjack future hackers). The chat program is ONLY for everyone who is currently logged on PBWIKI so they can talk if they're on. It's good so far.

Same thing with music. They have dumb ads. But my @#$()*& kids have figured out a way to put music on without ads. God bless them.

This week each class went over what kinds of things I need to look for when I grade these. As something new, and because I got into a great discussion with my AP out the merits of rubrics (she hates them and thinks they're one reason our kids only strive for mediocrity), I decided we're going to come up with what everyone needs to do the BARE minimum. The rubric will be for a 70 (C-). i.e. this is what you need to have on your wiki to barely pass. I'll keep you posted on that one.

I have it set up so that I get updates on the hour. I have it piped into my special Outlook folder. It's so coool. I want to hug PBWiki. So far I would say 70-80 percent of my students play with their wikis at least once a day.

Kids are doing what I asked them to do this week: get on, play around with it, and get in contact with the other students in their civilization. EVERY STUDENT HAS DONE THIS.

I set up a helper elf chart on front page today and asked those HTML students who want to volunteer to help with the little things (background colors, videos, etc) can sign up so everyone knows who the experts are. This is the smartest thing I've done thus far.

I am extremely and absolutely happy with the way things are going so far. I'm going to wait a week before I give YOU the link. Some are almost viewer-worthy, most are still in their infancy stage.

Bye bye bye!

FIRST DAY

So I started wikis today. I think it went VERY WELL! We had to do some other things first, things that were very important (finish up reading projects and go over the haikus my students posted on my Sharepoint). That left us with 45 minutes. Not enough time!

Yesterday I wrote out my survey questions. I added as many as I could possibly think of. I figured when this is all over I can weed out the ones that end up being irrelevent. I'll post the questions on here sometime. I've got to send myself an email from school (blogspot is banned from all DoDDS Pacific servers and for good reason! There's a massive dearth of inappropriate blogspot sites out there for HS students). The survey questions are on my Sharepoint, so I'll get to those later.

I ran out of time for my A3 class. I forgot to have them take the survey. DANGIT DANGIT DANGIT! That's going to be troublesome because when they end up taking the survey on Monday, they'll have spent the weekend getting to know what a wiki is and I fear their survey answers will be inaccurate. Ugh ugh double ugh. I'll post a notice on my home page asking A3 kids to respond to survey during seminar tomorrow.

I had them working on eNotes (Cornell notes on a word document and they just submit it to my Sharepoint drop box) while I called them up one by one to give me their email addresses. Then they logged on and set their own passwords. I purchased the upgrade to Silver for one reason: so that each student has their own password to access the wiki. Oh, and because it has more memory space and some more functions.

Their assignment for this weekend is to put their contact email on the group project template on PBWiki. The other things they have to do are: contact the other member(s) in their civilization; figure out a family name and where in their civilization's history they want the happy family to begin their story; and spend at least 30 minutes getting to know/playing with the wiki. They know they are supposed to snoop around the other civilization wiki pages, but they are not allowed to alter the other civilization pages one single bit.

I showed them how I can check the history pages and how easy it is to revert it back to the previous copy. And, because I'm dealing with 14 and 15 year olds, I felt it encumbent upon myself to add, "please do not ever let me find out you tried to vandalize another civilization's pages."

I hated that I had to include that but...I want to cover all my bases. No one will, but I'm trying to plan for everything here.

The best part? This evening I was at my desk and I got a dozen notices of students who went on and played around with their wikis. That made me so very happy to see!

Next week we will come up with a grading rubric for the wikis, and we'll come up with project goals. As I said in my TIP, I do not want to tell them "you must have so-and-so amount of links, and so-and-so many pictures, videos, etc." I want them to be as creative with this as they humanly can.