Module 10

Our school IT advisor has been pushing the use of Wikis for a while now and I have noticed that alot of staff have jumped on board. I was always curious as to what they were and how they could be used in the classroom and with your class. It was not until recently when we started looking at module 9 and 10 that the concept of Wikis came into our discussions and we were able to have a detailed discussion about there multiple possibilities.

After a lengthy discussion on wikis I decided that it was time to attempt to set up a wiki for one of my classes. So with the help of our IT specialist I successfully set up a wiki for my year 9 class who have laptops and are familiar with wikis from other classes.

Creating the wiki and discovering the many opportunities involved turned out to be fun.

I found that setting up this wiki is going to allow me to make use of the many tools that I have become familiar with throughout the web2.0 course. I feel that this wiki has the potential to initiate a more student centered approach within the classroom. It will allow students to post and share work with the whole class as well as more productive eLearning activities, especially when the activity is connected to an outside source. Recently I have found that when trying to use outside sources to assist in learning that students get off task and learning becomes unproductive due to everyone trying to reach the same destination. By using the wiki our learning can become more productive because I will be able to put the sources up onto the wiki, which will allow the students to access the activity/resource/site from within the schools server.

At present I have not done alot of class work with the wiki but I am hoping that by slowly encouraging students to access the class wiki for different task that they will take the initiative to use it more frequently, especially for discussion as they have a difficult time generating productive discussions within the walls of the classroom.

How can Web 2.0 assist in improving learning outcomes for all students?

I believe that after having gone through each of the 10 modules within web2.0 that I will be able to use the tools and strategies learnt to assist all students within my classes to learn to the best of their abilities. The strategies within this course provide for people of all learning abilities and learning types; however it is up to the instructor to use those tools and strategies to best suit the learner. These strategies have enormous potential for improving the outcomes of students, not just the outcomes of students with learning difficulties. Web2.0 can be used to engage those students who lose interest quickly, to encourage an interactive classroom, to assist in collaborative tasks and to provide students with a variety of learning tasks and activities.