Experiences+using+ICT+in+the+classroom

=Creating a Class Wiki with Second Graders:=

So far I had the chance of creating 2 Wikis with second graders at the "Colegio Anglo Colombiano" (8 - 9 year olds). Our first experience was not so succesful but it allowed us to reflect on what went wrong and gave students some experience. Our first Wiki was done using PB Wiki. For me it looked more as a Blog than a Wiki and possibly that was the problem. Our students were not so sure how to include their posts and they thought they had to leave a comment. Most of them wrote... I like this, Hi, how are you? etc.

Our second attempt with that same age was with Wikispaces. We created a Wiki for our Feel the Beat unit of Inquiry. The result was a lot better. We had students making meaningful coments, experimenting changing font types and colours and even adding images. Please make sure you have a look.

Creating usernames in both sites was easy. PB Wiki and Wikispaces have a feature that allows teachers to create Bulk users and all the students had to do was to log in and request to join the Wiki. We completed this task really easily during one of our ICT sessions.

One problem we faced was the fact that the same page cannot be edited at the same time for more than one person. That makes it difficult to use the ICT lab with all the students at the same time, unles you create some sort of journal page for each student.

By Christianne Cowie