New Wikis for Projects

PBwiki

MSAD75 District Office has subscribed to a PBwiki service that allows us to create several wikis to support projects to improve student learning and assessment. If you have an idea for a project, describe it here or in a message to the District Technology Committee and we will work together to find ways to support it.

• High school project site: a group of high school students and teachers have worked on culminating projects. If we invite them to share their experiences in that work, we can help them to build their personal portfolios and they will be helping us build portfolios of ways in which we are supporting Maine Learning Results and 21st Century goals.
• Students from the district attended the annual Maine Youth Action Network Conference (MYAN). They might want to start a site to reflect on and develop some of the ideas they discussed there.
• a group of five teachers collaborating on collecting information for the elementary math pilot decision are sharing ideas and information through wiki pages.
• a group of middle school teachers would like to build wikis to use with students especially for service learning projects. These wikis would allow the students to collaborate with the people " in the real world" who are involved in the service learning projects.
• 2 elementary teachers in different buildings collaborating and sharing student writing
• ... Add your ideas here ...

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Wikispaces

We have started a test site at msad75.wikispaces.com in order to evaluate it as an alternative to PBwiki. Wikispaces emphasizes a slightly different set of features that may have some application to our needs.

Wikis for middle school and elementary students?

The challenge of requiring email addresses for middle and elementary school students (described in Q&A on Technology Department: We're Here for You) may be one case in which Wikispaces can help us overcome a barrier. On the Wikispaces page describing support for teachers, they present the following alternative:

5. Is there an easy way to create accounts for all of my students?

Sure - if you don't want your students to have to create accounts themselves, just email help@wikispaces.com with a list of usernames, email addresses (if you have them - if you don't just leave them out), and passwords in the following format and we'll create the accounts for you.

They go on to describe the full procedure on the page. One of the reasons for requiring email addresses for wiki users is to deter spammers from using wikis for their nefarious work. If we agree to monitor our students' work to ensure they are not generating spam, Wikispaces will allow our students to contribute to our wikis on Wikispaces even if we have not yet resolved the issue of email addresses for middle and elementary school students. Other teachers across the country are convinced:

PBwiki might want to consider implementing a similar program for its wikis. I looked for evidence that they would support student participation without email accounts and could not find one.

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