Last week when the assignment was to make a
blog I thought, “Oh this will be easy.” As I already confessed, I’m already a
bit of a blog junkie…although I’m not great at the follow through. This week,
however, I felt completely the opposite as I read the assignment. Not only do I
have no experience with wiki’s, it is a term I barely know or have heard. As I
read through the plan for the week, I thought “oh man, this is going to be
struggle.” I am happy to report that I survived making my first wiki, and that
it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. Here it is, if you would like to see it!: my wiki.
The videos helped, a
lot! I am not sure I could have successfully done it without them. Especially
the video, Wikis in plain English.
What I find interesting about this video is that it made the most sense to me,
but did not utilize any actual screen shots of a wiki site. I also found the
video, Wikis in the Classroom, very
interesting but had a difficult time thinking about how I would utilize wikis
for kindergartners while viewing it. I see how useful it might be in an upper
grade, but kindergarten is a bit more challenging, technologically speaking. My
kindergartners are not so independent and clicking between links on the navigation
pane would be difficult for them.
I found the readings,
both the article by Tim O’Reilly, What is
Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of
Software and the Wikipedia entry, Wikis,
to be equally difficult and interesting. I had to read through them each…a few
times…before I understood what they were saying. I was feeling a bit like
Charlie Brown when his teacher was speaking, the technical jargon was sounding
a bit like “wah wah, wah wah wah” to me. I think the problem, for me, is that a
lot of common technology terms are not common knowledge for me. Perpetual beta,
scripting language, SQL, these are the terms that I had a hard time with, they
aren’t everyday language for me. Sometimes I think I need things in 5-year-old
speak (I am a kindergarten teacher after all.) None-the-less, I persevered and understood
to the best of my ability what was being taught. What I found the most
interesting about the O’Reilly article is what he calls “harnessing the
collective intelligence” or utilizing the long tail not just the head, making
sure to engage every user or the entire web. I never noticed before how
interactive the internet is, and how every click on a website gets saved for
future data.
As I read this, I
began thinking of my own wedding planning, and how I cannot open facebook,
gmail, or other webpages without finding “suggested sites” such as David’
Bridal, Nordstroms, or “Paper Divas” listed on every banner. The internet is
learning, too well, what my recent search history has been and it is adapting
to my needs. (It’s scary how much I wedding plan apparently!)
As a kindergarten
teacher, I was most inspired by some of my own searching through wikis. I
stumbled across this page, and
thought, “What a great resource for a kindergarten teacher.” I constantly have
parents asking about extension and enrichment activities, ways they can
practice at home and asking “what was that activity you did yesterday? My
son/daughter wants to try it at home!” I would love a place to compile that
information and have it available for parents to access at home. Possibly,
even, with a lot of practice, my kindergartners could chose activities from
large navigation icons to use during centers or other times during the day. It
could also be easily differentiated for learners working on specific skills at
a certain level of difficulty.
I think wikis, very definitely, could have a purposeful place in my early childhood classroom.
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