Shira+Z

http://shirazimmerman.wikispaces.com/

Although I teach first grade, I definitely think that Wikis would be a useful tool in my classroom. According to Morgan and Smith, Wikis are “engaging to students, easy to use, and the multitude of uses is limited only by your and your students’ imaginations” (p. 52). After searching through other teacher’s wikis and creating my own, I can definitely see how this would be the case. Since students are fascinated by technology and the prospect of having their work published, Wikis can help students successfully communicate with one another. Furthermore, “not only are students working collaboratively in ways that foster greater communication, they now have access to technologies that help them organize and communicate their ideas through the use of graphics, photos, animations, videos, colors, and sounds as well as text” (Valmont, p. 161-162).

In my own classroom, I can see using Wikis in a few different ways. For the one I created for this assignment, I had each of my students reading a book, creating a writing piece, and then responding to other students’ writing. While my students would not be able to do this on their own, I think it would be a great way for parents and students to work together. Another way I was thinking to use Wikis was to make it almost like a class webpage. I saw many examples of Wikis where teachers put all of their class information on one for parents to take a look at. I think this is a great tool because parents can also leave comments and respond to things that are going on in the classroom instead of creating a hand written note or waiting for an e-mail response.

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