Cat Tech

Blackboards 2.0

There is a very nice article in today's Baltimore Sun, Blackboards 2.0, by Arin Gencer, about wikis being used to record and extend the learning from a class.

The wikis are being used in a variety of ways.

• The "wiki for advanced placement U.S. history has become an extension of his classroom, a place where he can point his students to additional resources tied to what they are learning - such as a podcast lecture on the Salem witch trials."
• Notes from class conversations are recorded in the class wiki, and then homework asks students to return to the wiki and continue adding thoughts.
• Teachers have created a professional development wiki for themselves, where they post relevant PD links.

Catlink has a built-in wiki that is quite good for these purposes. [You can access the full help pages on the Moodle site.] By way of example: a wiki is just text that can be formatted as usual, and to make new pages & add new links, you simply surround a word in brackets.

 In AP Psychology, I had the problem of students forgetting their summer reading by the time the AP test rolled around. The book they had read provided summaries of famous psychological studies and experiments that students needed to remember at the end of the year. To create some kind of permanent record of what they'd read, I created a wiki for the students to fill in. I created one page, and they did the rest of the work for themselves. The page that I created was a simple table that had a list of the book's chapters, and then an assigned student who had to then summarize that chapter.

Students merely clicked on the question mark next to their name, and the wiki created the new page for them, and automatically linked to it. All students needed to do was type in their summary on the new page, and save it. This is a great tool, as the teachers and students around Baltimore are finding.