Creating a Class Wiki

http://northhighschool.webaloo.com/turnerenglish10.aspx

After much time experimenting with PBwiki, I finally created a class website through my district's website. The benefits of a class website are numerous--I can easy post assignments and discussion questions and students seem to respond to it much more than a normal journal or writing the assignments down in a planner. I can easily work from any computer with Internet access--transferring files, downloading, and uploading at will. When I find interesting tie-ins to what we are doing in class, I can simply add the Internet links to the website--this allows me to capture news stories, youTube videos, pictures, online newspaper stories, literature posted online, any audio and traditional website links. At first there was difficulty in the amount of time it took to maintain the website. However, I learned that if I never doubled everything up and just did everything online instead of creating a word document or a plan of some sort first, that I could spend the same amount of time in my planning as I do normally, while offering students a much richer learning environment. There is also the added benefit of more flexible timeframes for assignments, since students can submit their posts from home. I am able to track how often students check the website and especially nice is that every submission has a timestamp. Students are already much more accountable for their work and I am seeing an improvement in timeliness since they know there is some flexibility, but ultimately no way to lie to the computer and me about an assignment, and there is no way for it to be lost.

While a wiki would give students an opportunity to shape their learning space, and certainly could decrease the amount of time I spend on maintaining the page, the power for many of my students may be too great. I am already seeing some students taking advantage of the fact that they can post anything to the message board. I have had to delete 3 posts already. The other concern is that students are not able to access the Internet at home or don't have a computer, and with our school only having 30 minutes of computer time available in the library after school, some students are feeling like they are being left behind. So far I have allowed them to do the assignments all by hard copy, but that has been doubling the amount of time I spend preparing once again. While not perfect, the website for the class is especially valuable and a powerful resource. I will continue to attempt a wiki--it has simply taken too much time and effort to get off the ground compared with a normal website through the school server, which is already set up for me.