Thing 6.. more info.

Of all the tools I have tried so far, I have to say that I have been most successful with the wiki. It has been extremely helpful for History Day projects. It has allowed students to post some of their turn in items (key question, thesis, sample annotations, etc.). This allows all students to see what their classmates are doing. This can be great for finding examples or knowing when a correction needs to be made. It has also saved me from dragging a ton of papers back and forth.

I would like to use google docs with more of my classes, especially with History Day and having students across different hours and/or teachers. As many people have found, it has been difficult to set up. I wonder how far away we are from each student having their own school email accounts?

Deleting on a wiki

One frustration I have found with the wiki: If students make comments on there that you would like to delete, you must do each individually which can take time. I emailed the wiki people to see if they give me a response or can change this. Most of the time you want the comments to stay, but if someone puts something dumb there, it would be nice to get rid of a chunck at a time, instead of one at a time.

More on the Wiki

Since break is over, I figured I better get back to blogging. I have continued with my wiki, and overall it has been a success. I gave the students extra credit for going to a public library for History Day research, if they would blog about it on the wiki, and I did have some students do this over break (shocking, that they are all A students!). This week I used it to have my students post their thesis statements. I liked this, because I didn't have 150 sheets of paper, I had all the thesis statements in one place, and the students could look at each others and assist one another. The wiki has actually made it easy to check through who has completed certain tasks, and who is not keeping up. So, that's all for now.