Sunday, November 23, 2008

K12 Online Conference 2008

Under the 2008 Kicking it up a Notch workshop, there is a session called Monsters Bloom in Our Wiki. I listened to this session because I have just learned what a wiki is and all of the ways that they can be integrated into teaching and learning in a classroom.
Monsters Bloom in Our Wiki is a project that is completed with two separate classes that integrate technology with the reading and writing standards. Also, this project included all the steps of Bloom's Taxonomy.
The students in the classes are introduced to adjectives and the importance of descriptive words. Then, by using a wiki, the students create a monster and then have to write out descriptive words so another student in another class can try to create the same monster. After both classes have recreated a monster, the original and the new ones are compared. The students then review how well they described their monster and what they could have done better. Both of the monsters and the descriptions of the monsters are then posted on a wiki so both of the students can compare their drawings.
The wiki is a great tool to use when collaborating with another class that may be across the state, country, or world. Three wikis that the workshop suggested using for this project are Wikispaces, PBWiki, and WetPaint. In my class, I have used the PBWiki and feel that it offers endless posibilities of how it can be used in a classroom. For example, I have used it to organize lessons, create a teacher web page, an online portfolio, and a webquest.

If you want to listen to the podcast you can click here
If you want to see the wiki site that the class created for their monster project, you can click here

2 comments:

Jo Schiffbauer said...

What a fun way to learn about wikis! Your description and the links you included made it easy to follow the project. And your labels will make it easier for your readers to use your blog, Emily!

Carrie H said...

It would be so much fun to do a project on monsters with kids. I never would have thought about using a wiki for the project, but that really would be a fun way to get kids involved in the activity and help them in using technology!