Recently while viewing the wonderful tweets by people that I follow on Twitter I came across a tweet by Andrew Marcinek (Here is a link to his Blog). He was sharing a Wiki that he created for his staff and students. The Boys Latin School Ed-Tech Resource Wiki serves as a home for all the links that he shares with his staff broken down by content level.
I really like this idea. Take a Wiki for your school and create a place for you to house links, resources, videos, lesson plans, publications, etc., organized by content area. By creating the Wiki, you are also allowing faculty and staff to add to it as well, therefore the burden does not always fall on you to update the site. Teachers can do that as well. You will probably still have to maintain it, and have a Professional Development on how to use the Wiki, but it makes for a great way to organize the information for your staff.
Every time that I received a great link or resource from a blog, I would just email it to the teachers who teach the subject matter that it related too. What if they delete that email? How will they be able to use that resource later when they finally do have time? What are the chances that I kept the email to send to them again (probably slim)?
I asked Andy for permission to copy the idea. I have not gotten around to it. We are busy with changing Email Servers among other things going on in our district. But writing this blog post has motivated me to get started. I will be working on a Wiki for my teachers in the coming weeks. Once I have started it and included some links, I will share it with you all.
Thanks for the inspiration Andy!
With a similar idea in mind, we set up a wiki for sharing web 2.0 tools with colleagues - apps4class.wikispaces.com - the idea is that the "how to" guides help colleagues who are less confident when trying new things out. The wiki is a place for anyone to collaborate/refer colleagues to, so please feel free to use it - after all, we don't all want to keep re-inventing wheels!
ReplyDeleteThat's just web 2.0 tools - in my own school, we share our planning, curriculum ideas, etc within our own staff area of our learning platform. It means we can keep aspects confidential, but works along similar lines to Andy's wiki.
As a ELA supv, I have been creating a wiki for shared resources. The problem is the teachers aren't really buying in to it. Any ideas for how to lead the horses to the water AND make them drink??
ReplyDeleteThis is how I share useful sites with our teachers. I found the same problems with emailing - they may not be relevant to everyone, or an email inbox is full etc. The wiki has been a success and lots of teachers are using it. You're welcome to check it out.
ReplyDeletehttp://hpslinks.pbworks.com
A big problem with existing wikis is - they are either ad supported or subscription based. The Kid Report (http://thekidreport.org) is neither. It's a non-profit, built with the latest open-source tools specifically for Teacher-Parent collaboration and publishing: it's completely private, auto-emails on updates, easy membership management.
ReplyDeleteI've found wiki's get out of date without people reading them regularly. Auto-emailing on changes is a great way to pull people in.