Student Production of Media Matierals Unit

April 30, 2009-

I tied this project in with my wiki staff development project. Before doing my staff development, I wanted to "test the waters" with a couple of willing teachers. I started with one willing teacher and ended up with 4 teachers who were interested in working with me on getting their students to use wikis.

It was a great way for us to work together to figure out the kinks and gaps in our understanding of wikis and all that goes into using them with students. For example, the first wiki we did was extremely difficult to grade based on the rubric we created. We were trying to grade the student discussions and found that the students did a lot of their discussion on the telephone or in class--even though we had told them to discuss online so that the teacher could follow the path they took to get to the final product. She also wanted documentation of each student's participation within the group.

So, after spending almost 2 hours grading one class's wiki/discussion boards we decided we had to make some changes for the next time, and then I could pass that experience on to the the other teachers that I helped and ultimately to the staff development unit.

I've provided the links to some of these wiki pages below.
http://mixonenglish11.wikispaces.com/ - Harlem Renaissance Project
http://adollshousepage.wikispaces.com/ - Discussion of a novel read outside of class with background research information
http://mattice-p3.wikispaces.com/ - Harlem Renaissance Project
http://chase-p5.wikispaces.com/ - Collaborative group writing assignment; students wrote a thesis statement, introduction paragraph, and outline collaboratively