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.

History Day Wiki

Well, I finally have my wiki set up for History Day. Bachman and I are using the same one, so I got all our students on and made sure it worked. They only had to write their topic and key question down to make sure everything works-- simple enough. It worked fairly well. The best part of having the students have accounts is that their name is attached, so if someone decides to write inappropriate comments, it's attached to them. Let's just say, there always has to be one to try it, and that genius could not figure out how I knew it was him that was calling people names on the wiki.
Why does there always have to be one kid to wreck something? I did have to spend 10-15 minutes going through and deleting his comments, just so noone else feels like they have the freedom to do this. So, he has joined the ranks of wiki probabtion--- any more inappropriate comments and his access will be gone, and I guess I will need to babysit him. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH--Thank goodness it's time for break. Merry Christmas :)

Thing 6

Well, I thought I should probably do Thing 6 before the holiday season, or this month's would not get done. I did find it interesting to read the teacher's assignment on the students going in and fixing up wikipedia--what a good way to have students do research, yet also look for fallacies. I don't mind students browsing wikipedia for a topic search or just to get an idea, but many of them cannot break away from using it--like it's the know all end all source. I just attended a History Day Workshop yesterday, and they are trying to get students out of this habit too. They told us there really should not be any sources on their bibliography from wikipedia.

As for GoogleDocs, I cannot say that I have ever really used this. I have learned about them through MILI and have gone through the steps of working with one. I have even set one up, in case I get the urge. However, right now I feel that I have enough on my plate. In the future, I would like to look further into using them in the future--if I can think of a great reason to use it. I have talked to a few students about using it for History Day, since they are working with people in different hours or classes. So, we'll see if we get to try it out.

Moving onto wiki's, I will be setting one up for History Day. I am not making it mandatory, but will offer some extra points for using the wiki. So, I just got started on this process and will need to find out how it works.

History Day-- narrowing down topics

Next week, we start working on helping students find History Day topics. Since we teach World History, students are required to choose a global individual (Non-American) who made an impact and is a legacy. I have looked at the research process materials, and I believe that there are a few sheets I can utilize to help the students who are struggling with narrowing down a topic or topics. Has anyone used any specific one and found success?

Shopping for deals

I will admit that I was one of those crazy people who actually went out and braved Black Friday shopping. I always have, and I think I always will, but I went at 10--I'm not getting trampled by the extra craziness (I mean a Walmart employee on the East Coast go killed by people, when he tried to open the door to let customer sin). Anyway, I know you can shop online, and yes, I have done this before, but I don't like paying all the shipping charges. My sister has already done quite a bit of her Christmas shopping online, and she encouraged me to look, because there are good deals. Lots of places were offering extra 40-50% off for buying items online. Plus, many places are offering free shipping this year, even if you're not spedning lots of bucks. So, I'm off to check out some deals.