Reflections on using a wiki

John Blake has been an absolute incsub legend in the first few months we’ve been going, he’s been pushing and developing PHPWiki and TikiWiki to the absolute max and has achieved some really cool things (check out the PHPWiki site here and the TikiWiki site here).

John’s also keeping an incsub association blog which I’d encourage any K12ers who are interested in this area to check out and today posts a story entitled: Reflections on a Wiki in my Classroom.

Here’s an extract:

“Now the hard part. How do I develop content that students will become engaged in?

This issue is true with any educational strategies. I liken class wikis to the movie “Field of Dreams.” For those few like one of my fellow teachers that only see movies after NBC or CBS shows them, Kevin Coster’s character builds a baseball field in a corn field and sits and waits for the ghosts of baseball legends to come and play….

Wikis have to be more than a nice looking “baseball diamond.” I have been search for ideas for content on the web that might fit. One idea that as come to me on my own it that years ago, we used activities designed to use with newspapers- I wonder what the heck I did with that notebook. Seems like I gave it to a math teacher that left in the middle of the year, maybe not who knows….” [read the entire post]

On a personal note thankyou John for jumping in so keenly and with such persistence to the incsub world… you’re an invaluable experimenter and adopter and are helping the incsub project develop like you don’t know!