Name: Gloria E. Jacobs

Wiki Address: http://igenlit.pbwiki.com

What grade do you teach? College Juniors and Master's students

Please upload a screenshot of your PBwiki:

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What was your first experience setting up a wiki for your classroom, what did you learn?

I first set up a wiki two years ago for a graduate level class on literacy in the content area. It was an experiment just to learn how to use wikis. During that first semester, I learned that using the wiki was far more user friendly than Blackboard, the electronic classroom interface in use by our college. I just used the wiki as a demonstration site for my students that first year. That first year, I learned how to set up a wiki and to design it and how to organize the pages to make it user friendly.

 

What lessons worked well with the wiki, which didn't?

The second year of using the wiki, I made it far more interactive. I used it to build community by posting everyone's picture on a "Who We Are" page and asking students to contribute brief bios to that page. That worked really well. It helped me learn who my students were and it also helped my students get to know one another. We also used it as a springboard to discussions about online privacy and the nature of the public and private in today's world.

 

I also had my students create podcasts which they uploaded to the wiki. This was a fascinating activity. I found that their writing was so much better when they were writing for broadcast than when they were writing standard academic papers. The act of making their writing public and the act of reading their work out loud lead them to be much more aware of the cadences of language, punctuation, and organization.

 

There were two lessons I was most excited about but found they were the weakest. One was having the students create digital stories using PowerPoint. They were to use a little text, music/audio, and images, and have it set to run automatically. Some students did a fabulous job on this, but some others were less impressive. I found that there were a lot of technical problems and it also took up a lot of space to upload those to the wiki. I think, however, the students did learn the main point of the lesson which was to consider the interaction between text, audio, and image in the meaning making process. The other lesson that didn't go as well as expected was having the students create their own wikis. I wanted them to know how to create wikis so they could use them when they became teachers. The assignment was for them to use the wikis as portfolios for the projects, lessons, and so on that they had been creating in their teacher education courses. A few students created great wikis, but a number of them just did the minimum amount of work required. I don't think they realized the power of wikis in education.

 

Did you have a difficult time introducing PBwiki in your school?  If so, how did you convince your principal?

I don't have a principal because I'm at the college level, but I didn't have to convince my dean. I have a great deal of academic freedom and able to do pretty much what I want to do within reason.  As you'll see below, my toughest audience was the students.

 

How did your students adapt to using a wiki in the classroom?

The hardest sell actually was to the students. Even though they are members of the Internet generation, they were resistant to my use of technology in the classroom and my requiring them to experiment and learn about different technological tools for teaching, learning, and literacy. At first they were angry that I wasn't using Blackboard like all their other professors. They were intimidated by podcasts, blogs, and wikis. They were worried about privacy. This from people who have facebook accounts! But by the end of the semester, most (but not all) understood the implications of technology and uses of technology like wikis for educational purposes.

 

The one thing they really liked about my use of the wiki was that every week I posted what that upcoming assignment was. They had a syllabus, but by posting assignments on the wiki, I was able to be more flexible and respond to their learning needs rather than moving lockstep through a pre-established curriculum and syllabus. They were uncomfortable with that because by the time they get to me they've been socialized to certain ways of thinking and acting in higher education, and I was asking them to do something different. Once they saw what I was doing, they liked it.

 

My next goal is to make the wiki more interactive. The students tended to see the wiki as mine not ours, and were hesitant to contribute to it. I know that's going to be a hurdle as well and one I'll have to carefull scaffold.

 

What should first time wiki users be aware of?

• Start simple.
• Don't try to do too much at once.
• Let your class needs drive wiki content rather than trying to figure out everything in advance. Wiki pages are so easy to add, that you can respond the the changing needs of the class with ease. It really makes responsive teaching more doable.
• Scaffold student use of wikis carefully, but once they've gained a level of comfort with it, let them explore and play.
• Don't assume that just because students are members of the Internet Generation that they are facile with technology. They know only that which is socially meaningful to them (such as Facebook/Myspace and texting). Wikis may not have entered into their world because they haven't had a use for it yet. Be prepared for resistance.
• When sharing your wiki with other faculty, keep your initial presentations simple. Technophobes are easily intimidated. Start out with simple text entry and editing. Add multimedia and widgets later when people start saying, "Gee, I wish..."
• If you're going to post student work, consider making the wiki private. Even though youth seem to have no limits to what they'll put on line, they actually do, especially when it comes to their academic life.

 

Using Video

I teach literacy theory, so I use this youtube video called "Book Help." It's a skit in which a medieval monk struggles with making the transition from scrolls to books. I use it to introduce the idea that literacy is a technology, and that books are  a technology even though we no longer think of them that way. It helps get the students past their fears of working with digital technologies such as wikis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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