Rookie mistakes - live and learn. That’s the story of my day! I started out with my wiki project this morning and quickly encountered a MAJOR problem that I should have been aware of. No excuses, I should have researched this more fully before embarking on the project. I had the entire class (in 9 groups) working on the project all at the same time, but wikispaces doesn’t allow simultaneous editing of a page. Major whoops - kids had a lot of work erased and got pretty frustrated. I had to quickly move all groups but one out of the wiki and have them keep their research sites open while we waited for 1 group at a time to add their links. This slowed us down considerably and the students grumbled a lot, which they surely had a right to do!
After class I created 10 group pages that I will now be using for individual group research. I’m actually glad that this happened because I realized that it will be great to have the group pages - now I can have each group draft their blog posts on the wiki rather than in Word. This will make it much easier if a group member is gone or if one group doesn’t finish before the 10 day rotation is over. A group in the next rotation could just pick up where the other group left off.
This situation is one of many that needs to be addressed before embarking on new technology projects, but what is interesting is that I couldn’t have actually tested this out on my own at home. You can only be logged into one wikispaces account at a time on any computer. What I should have done is send out a tweet to make sure that my idea would work. After class today, I even found a discussion on Classroom 2.0 about this very issue.
Lesson learned - I will make sure to do MUCH more research before trying another new tool in my classroom!
If you're new here (or just forgot last time!), you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
And just think how much I learned from your mistakes! I am teaching a grad course this summer and plan to do something like this. Please update how the individual pages work.
Hi Kate:
I had similar results last year when I started working with wikis. This is how I set up the seventh and eighth grade to collaborate between classes this year. This is how I preset the workspace for the fifth grade. When I worked with teachers, I got all their names in advance to preset their names in advanced. It’s all live and learn when you try new things. Hope these examples might help. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have multiple people update at the same time? It would be a programming nightmare, though.
Ann
Leave a Comment