 Hi, I'm Mark Wagner president of the Educational Technology and Life Corporation in Irvine, California I'd like to welcome you to wiki while you work and introduction to wikis and education I'm thrilled to be presenting again for the K-12 online conference, and I'm glad you've joined me now On with the show. What's on the agenda today? First I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the read-write web what that is and what it means for you and your students now If you saw my presentation a couple of days ago on blog if you love learning don't worry It's fresh new stuff but We got to go over the basics for the others and believe me the review won't hurt Then I'm going to talk to you about wikis in particular and how you can use that tool in your classroom and with your students Got plenty of examples of educational uses of wikis and of course We'll have some how-to there. We even got some real interviews this time Both with my wife Eva and with my colleague Dave Conley who's just doing some amazing stuff with wikis First though if you want to see how easy a wiki is for a first-time user Head right on over to wiki while you work dot wikispaces.com It's kind of long, but you'll remember it wiki while you work dot wiki spaces dot com There's no w w or anything necessary there Head on over there, and if you've been in any of my workshops before these questions may look familiar, but there's three Opening questions to get you thinking I want you to answer the question. What is the read write web? Go ahead and click edit this page up at the top of the page Put your answer in right below the question. There may be others answers there The second question is what is a wiki when I activate your prior knowledge here? What do you guys know about wikis go ahead and put in your answers? This is asynchronous so with any luck you folks won't be editing it at the same time And we'll see everybody's answers grow as the conference goes on The third question then is what do these things mean for you and your students the read write web and wikis that is? There's a fourth bonus question, but you're gonna have to actually visit the wiki to see what that is so head on over to wiki while you work dot wikispaces.com and go ahead and pause the video at the end of this segment and Hit play again when you're done serious hit pause and hit play again when you're done All right, I'm gonna hit pause All right, we're back. I hope you all visited the wiki and put your answers in under those questions now Even if you just reflect it on the questions in your mind as you're watching the video I'm sure you wonder how your answers are measuring up It isn't unless you read everybody else's answers on the wiki and you have a pretty good sense about where you stand It's one of the good parts of the read write web now, isn't it? Anyway, if you're wondering what I'm talking about and again for the others review won't hurt Why don't you join me downstairs at the kitchen table to talk about the read write web? Like old media books and newspapers for example the web used to be a one-way operation for educators We could read the paper, but we weren't adding to it or editing it in any way And we could read websites download text images audio video But we weren't adding to or editing those either information was moving one way from the producer To the consumer and we had no control over that. We were dependent on publishers to tell us so what was relevant? What was interesting? What was news? It was a one-way web. It was the web 1.0 It was the read-only web, but things are changing come upstairs As I was saying things have changed you no longer need access to a web server You don't need skills like being able to program HTML or use FTP to have a web page any longer All you need is any old computer with an internet connection in my case laptop with a wireless connection here in the house in fact I'm working on the wiki I created to support this presentation. I'll write something obvious you can pick out there later I'm writing this from my bed in my robe As I film the presentation How do you like that shot? And I'll save it Goes right up to my wiki. It's part of the web now In essence, it's just as easy now to create and share online content as it is to consume it It's a two-way web the web 2.0 a read-write web All right So maybe you're getting the idea that the web is changing and that this might be important for Educators and students, but what about wikis? Where do wikis fit into all of this? well, basically wikis are a Particular tool within the greater set of read-write web tools like blogs and podcasts RSS feeds social networking social bookmarking and other things you'll hear about during this conference But wikis are in essence Well, tell you what? I'm gonna quote from gifted education communicator volume 37 number two page 10 wikis are websites that can be quickly edited by any visitor The term wiki comes from the Hawaiian word wiki wiki, which means quick or fast And if you can use a word processor, you can edit a wiki Most wikis allow a user to simply click an edit button in order to start editing the page Just like any other document text can be added changed or deleted as can pictures audio or even video One visitor can post a new thought which can then be improved upon by subsequent visitors If a wiki is ever abused used inappropriately or vandalized the next visitor can revert back to an earlier version of the page And don't worry. This comes from one of my trusted sources This guy now One of the best examples of what a wiki is and how it works is the wikipedia The wikipedia at wikipedia.org is a collaboratively edited online encyclopedia with over a million entries in English and nearly a million users worldwide It has a capacity to become something like the repository of all human knowledge because people from all walks of life can contribute their expertise One of the examples I like to use in workshops is the example of the tsunami article Back in I guess it was December 2004 when the tsunami hit in Asia. This article just blossomed And now if you head over there, you can see all kinds of information about tsunamis You can see images of the tsunami in 2004 and eyewitness accounts You can see animations of that tsunami and how that affected the area. I hope you guys can see that And if you scroll down the page Someone's taken the time to create an exhaustive table of contents. What a great resource for your kids here causes of tsunamis characteristics Signs of an approaching tsunami warnings and prevention Historical tsunamis and if you skim down the page you can see just how detailed these sections are with Visual visual aids lots of links to other sources lots of great images It's debunking common misperceptions here Look at all this tsunami waves signs of approaching tsunami warnings and preventions Historical tsunamis and no kidding. Look at this. It's got by year history of significant tsunamis and again kids can Click on any of these links here and go to additional related information. It's a phenomenal resource the Wikipedia and Of course because it can be edited your kids should they happen to Discover something that's not in here can actually come up to edit this page and Begin to add resources to the wiki pedia to notice these tools that are very word processor like We'll be doing more editing of wikis with wiki spaces Oregon a little bit, but how exciting is that but your students could actually contribute to the sum of all human knowledge Now because anybody can edit the wiki pedia It can be pretty easily vandalized. I could very easily click edit this page right now and Highlight everything and destroy it Of course the next person just needs to come into history and revert to the earlier version In fact the wiki pedia works because the white hats outnumber the black hats by orders of magnitude Someone posts inaccurate information or vandalizes a page. It's quickly reverted to a more previous I'm sorry a previous more authoritative version by another visitor the nature of the wiki pedia makes it a natural place to begin Discussions about information literacy verifiability and bias in a text I Often ask teachers what the highest Form of authoritative information is in academia sometimes it's surprisingly hard to tease this out of them But it's peer-reviewed journals If an article has been peer-reviewed, that's the highest form of authority Information can have in the academic circles and in some ways wiki pedia is the Largest most peer-reviewed Publication on the planet now, of course, it's not necessarily a board of editors though some of the Moderators on wiki pedia are unquestionably High-order experts in their fields But because anybody can edit there there certainly is the opportunity that you might come across some information It's not entirely accurate. So having your kids check their sources having them exercise their information literacy skills is going to be a good thing One of the other benefits of wiki pedia is the fact that because it's consistently updated you can find information on More recent topics like at the time it happened the tsunami for instance right now I could search for a podcasting I find a pretty in-depth article on podcasting now this particular article actually brings up Another interesting side of wiki pedia There was a couple of folks involved with developing podcasting among them Adam Curry who was a former MTV VJ and Dave Weiner who's a programmer and As I understand the story Adam Curry was actually caught red-handed Anonymously, but they tracked his IP address anonymously editing wiki pedia and removing any Any sections discussing Dave Weiner's contribution to the development of podcasting so Moral the story is a Students need to be on the lookout for any sort of bias or agenda behind the writing that's happening on wiki Pedia and oftentimes this is flagged. You'll see a little yellow tag across the top of the screen That'll say something like this article is flagged for Considiary language or biased language and it'll refer you to their policy and how to fix it But be You know the wiki pedia caught the editing and caught the perpetrator So there really are people dedicated to making things right on wiki pedia Another funny story. I like to share is at one point. I actually started a new article for the workshop that I was doing and Said you know so many teachers are learning about read write web in this place at this time on this day I'm just posted a new article now Within the hour we came back to the article and there was a flag across the top that said this article flagged for deletion reason trivial oh Hey, I was gonna put this thing away, but This is good stuff. I want to read you a little bit more On a smaller scale than the wiki pedia Teachers and students use wiki services such as wikispaces.org which we're gonna look at a little bit later when we do the hands-on bit to create collaboratively authored class texts Imagine collecting resources all year long on your class wiki Everything from grammar exercises to essays and from hyperlinks to video projects can be shared on a wiki with each student pitching in his or her Own contribution and actually thanks to the history feature Which I'll show you if each of the students have their own account number you can log in you can actually keep track of who's contributing What? Wikis are perfect for student group work and for teachers who are working together or have similar interests Consider professional learning communities for instance continue that conversation between your face-to-face meetings For instance if one teacher starts a wiki in order to share online resources related to an adopted textbook Teachers all over the school even all over the state can contribute and the more people contribute the greater the resource The wiki becomes Now I actually know a teacher who's doing that and she's got her office right next to mine Hey There's now a good time to talk about your wikis Sure Why don't you tell me about your HM tech wiki? What's it for? What how do you use it? Well, I started this HM tech dot wikis bases.com. What does that stand for first Houghton Mifflin? Technology Houghton Mifflin is our reading series and it's actually the series that most of the state has adopted So I figured with everybody using it or almost everybody might as well put something up there that other people could add to All right So when you put ideas up here other people can use them and then if they have ideas they can share them on here too Absolutely, so the more people using it the better, right? Definitely. Definitely. So we have it Organized by grade level right now. It's kinder through forth with with with most of it being kindergarten since that's what I teach And then it's just organized by themes So we're on theme two right now called colors all around and we're on week two So I can just click right on week two and it takes me to Phonemic awareness and different websites that I found that will help us learn our letters and our sounds So all these links here are related to theme two week two and Houghton Mifflin. Exactly. Oh, that's great And then there's presentations. I've made That you can download Posters that I found that you can download So the idea is that there's so much out there, but it's all in different places So this was a nice place for me just to put it all up there. Go to it when I need it All right, so that's HM tech wiki spaces calm if any of you out there want to contribute to Eva's wiki or see some of the resources that she's collected and it also has different types of Independent online games that kids can play. Oh, yeah that you might have seen on a block So games are good for kids, huh? All right, so this this grew into something else though. What was that? Well, I Started using it and it just was so easy because every year It's there already done that I decided I wanted something like this for other subjects, too so we started one called tech tips and the tip stands for technology integration projects and it's a collection of Projects that might last you a whole week or projects that you can do in one hour in the lab There's online games presentations for the whole class and it's also organized by By the curriculum, but kind of by months because in our district we're on pacing plans Oh, yeah, okay So the whole district is supposed to be on the same theme on the same chapter in math So with that premise There should be plenty of resources to pull from that we could all use at the same time So for September you'll see there's chapter one and for math and theme one for language arts the senses for science and so forth So any teacher in the district will k3 in this case can come edit this page and add Resources plus anybody could come here and just take advantage of all the work you've done and the others in your class Definitely and the idea too is that you know, even though this is a kindergarten page a first-grade teacher might decide that You know their first-grade students weren't quite ready for the time or the graphing and so that they can go back to kindergarten Type sites and help support their students that way. That's awesome So it's a way for teachers to share resources even across grade levels and around the district And it's as easy as edit this page. Isn't it? Yeah, very easy Anything else you want to say about how you're using the wikis in education? Just a note if you do want to add to it is a lot easier in Firefox. Oh, that's true. If you're on the west Yes, so far you have to do a little code breaking. So All right, so I only have one last question I think I can get a kiss on camera Okay, don't look now even it's not the only teacher I know that uses wikis in creative ways And I want you guys to hear from somebody who uses them with their students Also, I want you guys to hear from somebody who's a secondary teacher like I was don't leave you guys out in the cold there So we're actually going to take a drive across Irvine and talk to my colleague Dave Conway He uses wikis with his high school English students since really amazing ways and it's absolutely changed his teaching So I'm off. I've got my wardrobe and I'll see you guys over there What's up, Andrew? What's up, Dave? How's it going? Good. Come on in. Thanks. Thank you. So we're going to have wiki today? Yeah, almost every day. Let's take a look at it. Okay, what would you like to see? I want you to show me the Aristotle experiment and tell us all about it. The Aristotle experiment is something that I came up with a couple of years ago when I really wanted my students to experience education more to become lifelong learners rather than just passive students, you know taking in information rather than doing something wanted to be active and Well, I came across the wiki and that's pretty much radicalized my teaching. Really? Yeah, well Okay, what used to frustrate me with education was students would write an essay for example or put together a PowerPoint and It would last for all the amount of time that it took me to grade it and give it back to them Then it would go into the trash can or maybe into their portfolio, but whoever opens that right The Aristotle experiment Well once I got once I found out about wikis It changed the way that I could actually have the students do projects rather than just being From the student to the teacher and then back to the student. I was able to open up their work to a worldwide audience using the internet So as we say it's an authentic audience. Yes, it's an authentic And I know of course you give them an authentic purpose for all the writing they do Which is What's the address Aristotle dash experiment wiki spaces calm if you want to check that out So this is the wiki that you teach all your classes with Pretty much. Yes. I do I do use other web tools such as blogger for Doing journals or for having the students respond to literature online sure if I want the students to do work Where they create something and I just want other students to give feedback on it I'll use a blog but wikis you can do pretty much anything that you want to do from From putting videos online to Doing something a little bit more open than a blog Where anybody can respond or anything edit and collaborate and collaborate exactly And as you were pointing out talking about authentic audiences my students get feedback from students all over the world I was lost in the discussion section, but also students who will actually edit their work teachers will leave comments It's it's the learning experience at its most open. That's great. So why don't you tell me about some of these parts here like? This looks kind of boring though, but the grammar of vocabulary when we start there actually Let's go to grammar or to vocabularies first. It's nice of you to not only set out a camera for me But to set out some water that was nice. Well, you know, I figured somebody might come calling later tonight It's always good to record just in case First of all Vocabulary and grammar like you pointed out are usually boring static activities Sure takes 10 15 minutes during class to set up give the handouts to go over the Concept and then to have the students begin the handout at which point they take it home because you don't have enough time to finish it up in class or and Stay copy from their friend or they fill in the blanks and it's done Rather than doing it that way I've actually come up with a System for doing vocabulary that the students like a little bit more They actually do vocabulary in a research kind of mode rather than just as once again a passive Take her in of information, right? I notice you said it's done as soon as they fill in their spreadsheet the blanks to it's not you read it or anybody else reads it It's done. It's just turned it in and they're free to forget about it for the rest of the week Fair enough. So how's it work with a wiki? Well with the wiki? I actually have them build their own websites, which They use to teach other students the vocabulary lesson and the trick is at the same time they themselves are learning the vocabulary Sounds like two-way teaching to me Let me show you what I'm talking about for example This one's a good one Our poetic devices list now you can look at poetic devices within poetry and you can go over a poem that a student You know may or may not care about You can talk about the imagery and everything else But unless they're actually getting into the poems unless they're getting into the poetic device themselves They have a hard time remembering, you know a metaphor from assembly sure or you know, they're gonna use it Exactly they have to use it and so what I had them do keep in mind I want everything inquiry based or research based is I had them select a topic a poetic device by research based there you don't mean it's Proven by scholarly research. You mean they're doing research. They're doing research. Yes, they have to look it up They have to find it and for more complex projects actually have them use a variety of resources But for something simple like finding the definition of metaphor they can go online Okay, so this is cool. They've got the definition and got an example poem and an mp3 file Yes, actually, this is something that I tried to blend into every project I want it multi-media and text is good pictures make it better Mm-hmm, but if I have the students doing something like working with video or with audio It just raises it to the next level and I think it makes it a bit more authentic because once they get involved in the video Or the audio it's no longer just them taking information and setting it somewhere else or putting it in a new place But they're actually interacting with it just a little bit more It's sort of like given a presentation at a conference, but by video instead of standing in front of you right exactly And so this gives it just a little personal touch which makes education. I think a bit more fun And so for example, what I had to do was Record the poem that they used as their example, and then they're also supposed to or they were also supposed to include a little bit of analysis Audio file Well, so this is kids reading the phone. Yes, well, we'll have to dub it over later or send people to the website. Yes Unfortunately the speakers not the best on this however, this is pretty much the coolest tablet PC I've ever seen Well, that does Reach havoc with the lighting doesn't it does but as you can see it's roughly the size of a paperback. That's great which Along with the wikis frees me up from having to be the center of attention at least in the class behind the desk Yes, because I gave my desktop computer completely to the students. I never use it in fact the less of me In front of the class probably better So why don't you show me some of the web projects to those are cool? Okay? Let's go and take a look at the web projects now like I said What I'm trying to do is actually go beyond writing Okay, and yes, I know many of the standards for the English language arts are about but Actually to tell you the truth they go a little bit No, I'm just right because there's listening speaking The birds are going crazy. There's listening and speaking and involved. I think in pretty much every standard There's the idea that the students should be doing more than just reading and writing They should also be sure thinking about it talking about it and trying to interact with it in a more critical more fundamental level Once again wikis are great for getting the students to go beyond simply the reading and the writing aspect So what do they do with this wiki? Okay? Well what I Set out set out to do was to take the idea of the essay and kind of explode it take its component parts the ideas that People normally have about writing, you know your introduction your thesis your body paragraphs and your conclusion and put it into more versatile more interesting product So I think the kids are actually constructing a product online Yeah, and that was my main idea rather than once again something which was static to me Back to them and then in the file folder. So what's this? Moby-Dick theater, okay? Moby-Dick theater is actually a project that my juniors are currently working on over the summer At our school district. We have students read over the summer sure the text that my juniors were reading over the summer was Moby Dick now we spent the first few weeks doing literary analysis prepping them for this project and What they're to do is that to actually take the text of Moby Dick Chop it up into just the tiniest pieces that they need to prove a point that they're researching and presented in video form in other words It's kind of a readers theater version of Moby Dick But with a purpose with a point and so what I'm thinking about to when I was an English teacher trying to get kids to Remember quotes they could use in essays Particularly on the test or AP test or something like that. It was a key thing After they've done something like this, it's easier for them to remember them. Definitely and it's a lot more fun I mean have you ever read Moby Dick? Yeah, yeah, you remember you need teenagers to liven it up a little bit Exactly and anytime you get to take, you know, a 600 page book and turn it into a five to ten minute video Hilarity ensues So that's exactly what they had to do and take Moby Dick. They were given a topic Also, you posted topics attached to the process all that here Exactly I give them not only the topics but I give them some focus questions to help them think about the book I do this with every project and they can't edit this No, they can't edit this part, but for every project I give a Setup page where I give them the focus questions. I give them the topics I give them the due dates and that's process protective and that's protected and Then I also give the students a project page Where they can work either by themselves or in the groups to create on here. They can edit. Yeah And here they can create their project and I also include samples from previous years, which is what we have here So this looks like an assay on Moby Dick and industrialism. Yes And the trick is okay the text is all here now They still have to do the reading they still have to do the writing But the cool thing is as they're creating the video as they're prepping for the video They're doing all the prep work that they do for the essay. They go through their multiple drafts they for this they actually had to stage the video before they created it and What they finally come up with is basically an assay Now you have fun doing it you mentioned multiple drafts. Is the history function on here as cool I think it would be for multiple drafts history function is great because if you view the changes going back to the very beginning All the way through the final product. We can actually see The students text as it grows envelopes everything from the text that they've inserted to the text that they've deleted and So I've got a great visual history actually any visitor has a great visual history What they did to create this what they were thinking during the entire process So it must cut down on plagiarism when they can't just suddenly cut and paste something in you see it exactly Yes, and then I noticed most of your kids are logging in Anonymously as a guest, but if they all have their own accounts you can see who was contributing what yes And I've actually used both before I've had the students create individual accounts And what I'm actually currently using is a class account where they sign up using or they log in using a Password or a username and then a password and for right now. I'm using the houses from the Harry Potter Nice, so my third period for example sign up under Ravenclaw, and they have their password, which I can't tell you and Then they edit from there nice So you've said some pretty extraordinary things In other sessions, I've seen you're presenting about how this has changed your teaching. Can you talk about that for a little bit? Sure Possibly the biggest change has been Giving control over to the students All that I really have all that I'm really doing at this point is setting up a framework for them to work with And then let them go from there For example teaching literature from the literature book. I Think many teachers choose not to do it because it's rather time consuming to lessen plan for each Individual piece of text that you're reading in the literature book and to make each piece interesting and new And exciting to do something different with it pull an art You know from the period to compare with the work or to bring in a historical tidbit You know to make it interesting that's a lot of work And so it's not like they can wear a different shirt in a period to keep people's attention exactly or you know come dressed as Abraham Lincoln when they're reading Whitman, you know But the cool thing is Since I've set up a framework where I break the students up into groups pretty much everything is collaborative except for the individual essays that they're writing perhaps in practice for the CSTs or the Cassie tests that they have to take at the end of the year and we do a lot of collaborative work I want every person to have somebody that can work with them that can encourage them and So that's why I do a lot of collaborative work But getting back to How I set up the frameworks what I do is I give them a topic as with the web projects I provide a set of focus questions to help them figure out how to approach the topic for example Maybe it's a Grammar assignment. Maybe it's a short story. Maybe it's a selection of pros or a selection of poetry and What they do is using the focus questions using my guidance because I have them Work a couple of days in the lab each week Or I can do some one-on-one with each of the groups They put together a discussion not a lecture but a discussion where they actually ask the other students questions And lead them through what they found in that poem or in putting together that That grammar page and all that material is on your stomach. Yes, it's awesome Which works in many different ways not only are they leading the discussions, but they're also creating a study guide That will help them as they go through the year They can look back prepare for the finals prepare for tests if they're looking up something They were discussing handle it and they need to look up a tragic hero all the way from the beginning of the year And we're discussing Greek tragedies. They can go back and look that up And of course potentially they're helping other students around the world who can exactly come online and maybe search for this sort of thing And find your site, right exactly actually it was kind of funny The first project that I did with my freshman last year online was the Odyssey project And what they did was they created online visual story storybooks for the Odyssey and One group had the last section of the Odyssey and literature book which deals with Penelope and Athena And so they start building their page. They put some pictures up there They put some text up and they need to research something else another focus question And so they go to Google and they type in Penelope and Athena and they press enter in the first site that comes up That's great. Yeah, they ran around the library screaming for a little while. Oh my god. Oh my god people are gonna see this and Once they calm down they figured out well first of all they had better fix all of the spelling and grammar errors But it's actually pretty cool because nothing validates your work more than having somebody else look at it and use it and use it That's great Well, thanks for sharing me Dave is there anything else you want to add before before I take off again I got some editing to do tonight now just One thing that we can really do for your classroom I mean aside from getting the students excited about learning because they are actually learning is I think really free up the classroom. It energizes things No longer are students passive learners no longer are you somebody imparting all the information? You get to be a student you get to be a learner Just as the students are you get to coach them you get to interact with them if they have a question You might not know the answer but you get to work with them and find out. It creates a partnership of teaching Well, thanks for sharing with me and thanks for sharing everybody else sounds like you're getting a phone call So I guess I'll get out of here. Okay, but thanks See you It's time to get hands on okay back to the web Why don't you follow me to? wikispaces.com Slash site for teachers Adding all that extra stuff instead of just going to wikispaces.com because wikispaces will give you a completely free and Free of advertising site if you are an educator So I'm gonna scroll down a little bit here. It's gonna give me the option to join now I'm gonna make a new bogus account just to walk you through it. My username is gonna be wiki work Let's see password I'll make something up and Email address. I'll use my email address We do want to make a space space name I'll call it the same thing though in this case There's no need for you to call your username and your space name the same thing But for my sake I'm gonna do that I'm gonna make a public space although you could Potentially make it a private space if you wanted to do that which is free for educators if you wanted to make a wiki that Other people can view but only members of the space could edit you can make it protected You do need to check here to certify that the space will use for K-12 education and then join wiki spaces is currently Trying to give away a hundred thousand free wikis to teachers. So you might as well do this Okay, it noticed that I already had an account using a cmail address So I'm gonna go ahead and log in under my account But that's the process you guys would use to log in and create a new account. Here's my existing account And notice I've got all sorts of new spaces here Or sorts of spaces that I've worked on here but when you start out you're gonna be creating a new space and Here we are Choosing wiki work is our new space name again. I'm gonna make it public So this is what you'll see you when you create a new space welcome to your new space Notice here's the name of your space up in the upper left hand corner wiki work This is the home page for wiki work Which also appears in the navigation on the left and you have a button for edit this page By default the page has this information which is telling you how to use it As soon as you edit this page that disappears, but I'm gonna go ahead and click edit this page And now you get something that looks like this and as I said earlier if you can use a word processor You can use a wiki. So I'm gonna type something in here along the lines of this is a demo wiki For the wiki while you work Presentation at the K-12 online conference now Just like a word processor. I can make things bold underlines and italics so I can add a Title you know make that bold Maybe I want to emphasize demo wiki and maybe I want to link to K-12 online conference I can simply click the link button here Allows you to link to other pages within the wiki or You can put in an external link like K-12 online conference Or so you can see if you can use a word processor you can use a wiki even down to Creating bulleted lists or numbered lists lists of any kind Just as you would in a word processor highlight what you want to bullet use the bullet button and There you go a little resizing issue there. So I've got such a small screen size right now. I Could switch to numbers same issue and so on Now as soon as I have something. I'm happy with I scroll down to the bottom And I'm actually going to click on Any of these buttons save draft to come back to you later preview save which is what you'll use 90% of the time or cancel I'm going to say save Now check it out as easy as typing that making a few things bold and numbering list I have a new web page anybody that goes to wiki work dot wiki spaces calm at least right now We'll see this information. So this information could just as easily be a homework assignment or a question for the students It could be questions like the ones I left for you on the wiki while you work that wiki spaces calm Where you guys were able to come up to edit this page? And add your answers below the questions after you contribute your answers You can come down and save And that new information will be on the wiki. So editing the page pretty darn straightforward These other tabs here are important Clicking on page of course will allow you to view the page clicking on discussion allows you to post Messages about the page without actually changing the page particularly if this is a page that a lot of people have a lot of time And energy invested in you might post a message here about changes before making changes. So for instance Should the bulleted list be more meaningful I think if we're going to have a list On this wiki we ought to have one That means something to us Click post and sure enough you can see the first message here now anybody can come along and Read that message and in fact post a reply I think Meaningless text is just fine for a demo So now we've got some discussion going on about the page without actually editing the page itself So here the page content remained the same, but we have a lively discussion under the discussion tab There's the posts Now the history tab is important Because the history tab allows you to view previous versions of the page And to revert to them if necessary. So for instance at 9 32 p.m I created this version of the page You guys will remember this with a very nice neat bull or numbered list now The next version of it Which happens to be the current version in this case included this Inserted I think bulleted lists are great. Now. I've got two number ones So perhaps I want to revert to the earlier version click on history Click the earlier version of it and Click revert to this version says, please be very sure you'd like to change back. Yes, it invites you to leave a comment So I'm gonna say I like to this version better Your comment might indicate if the site was vandalized or if there was information lost into the edit That shouldn't have been lost and then go ahead and hit revert now here We are on the page and sure enough My initial content is restored Someone might be able to go back into the history now and see what I did and in fact see my comment If they disagree with me, they could of course revert back. We might have something of a revert war And if there's a moderator, they might want to control that However, they might also just come into discussion and say Why the revert to the second version? I liked the later version better because be great if you can encourage your kids to Stand behind their opinions and their reasons for the things they advocate in the discussion At any rate, that's how that works. You can see that so far. I've made all the reverse visions And I have contributed to the discussion If a random person comes along, I'm gonna go ahead and sign out. Now if a random person comes along to wiki work Dot wiki spaces calm because it's a public page. They can still edit it Notice I'm a guest And they could come in here and say Wagner wears funny ties They scroll down Save their work. And if we look in history We can see that in fact a guest from this IP address if that's meaningful to you a guest came along and made the last revision And we see that now it just announces that I wear funny ties So the very next visitor can come back to history view the previous version and Show changes Actually we're showing changes to that version and actually notice it didn't let me revert I actually have to be signed in to revert. You do have to be Accountable to some degree but you or your kids can sign in after a random guest is caused a problem And actually go into history View a particular version And revert to it saying undoing vandalism Now having guests being able to edit your wiki might be beneficial. I've actually heard of teachers whose students Had mistakes corrected by other students outside the school or other experts outside the school So that's uh One way you can do that. Oh, incidentally notice. I uh didn't use the site for teachers site when I actually did create wiki work So I've got some ads over here after all. It's not a big deal. They're google ads and wiki spaces certainly Deserves the revenue from any click-throughs All right, so we've looked at editing the page. We've looked at discussion We've looked at history I don't want to spend a lot of time on the notify me section, but if we click in there If you are a user of rss if you subscribe to blogs through rss you can also subscribe to wiki changes through rss So you can come down here and subscribe to page edit page edits through rss And then any time the page is edited the changes will come to your rss reader You can also subscribe to discussion so you can follow this lively discussion here in your feed reader as well This might be useful if you're keeping track of lots of student wikis Um, and you want to subscribe to those and keep track of those inside your reader again sort of an advanced topic But uh something that might be useful for you guys Okay, so we've looked at all the main tabs across here edit this page The page tab which we're viewing right now Discussion history and even notify me. It's time to look at some of the other actions we can take in this view One of those things we can do is create a new page Now this will be a sub page to our wiki space So wiki work is in this case the name of our wiki space And you'll see here wiki work dot wiki spaces dot com if we make a new page Say for resources You'll see it's going to be wiki work dot wiki spaces dot com slash resources. I'm going to go ahead and create that Oh, I was running through this earlier. So I had a draft. I'm going to discard the draft It's a nice thing about wiki spaces it actually if you navigate away from this editing page here without saving it It will actually recover your draft for you. That's Lifesaver if you're ever editing in a browser and have your browser crash or something like that You're going to appreciate that that feature at any rate. I've created a new Resources page. I'm going to type some content here resource links will be shared below And one such resource might actually be my blog educational technology and life Whoops Now we want that to be a live link. So I'm going to highlight it click the link button again up here And add my address If you're cutting the pasting into here be sure not to put a double HTTP All right, there we go. So I'm going to go ahead and save this new page Now we have a resources page at wiki work dot wiki spaces comm slash resources Great. Well, what if someone comes to wiki work and they want to get to the resources? Here's the main page. How are they going to get there? We actually need to add that new page to the navigation on the left To edit navigation you click on this little edit navigation link And now we're going to have to create a link not only to the home page But to the resources page Now remember when you click on the link here I mentioned earlier that you can link to a page within your wiki space So within the wiki workspace, we're going to link to the home page We're also going to create a link Within the wiki workspace to the resources page And then we're going to save our navigation Now we can see it here, but it's better if we go back to the main site And now you see that the navigation is in the left side So we created a new page in this case resources and then we edited our navigation and added resources to it So any visitor to wiki work can now come into the home page, which we're looking at Or they can click on the resources page and get the links and resources you leave for This is a great way to have different sections for Different users of your wiki For instance, Dave Conley's got sections like vocabulary and grammar and web projects You could certainly have sections like Links or Essays stories whatever it's going to be each kid could have their own page On your class wiki. There's a lot of different ways you can organize that if you're an elementary school teacher It could be You know, maybe your class wiki will have pages for each subject area science and math social studies english That sort of thing a lot of different ways you can create your navigation In fact for some teachers who want to do a teacher website or a class website Wiki might be more appropriate than a blog because you can have a very simple navigation with a relatively static but editable resources there All right, my macbook fans going crazy, but I got a press on so sorry about the background noise now I'm going to kind of Gloss over recent changes, but if you click on that link you can see recent changes to any page on your space So here's all the changes that made to the home page and here's the changes to the resource page And the change to the space menu that we made when we edited navigation Now the next link over here on the left is manage space and there's some interesting stuff in there You can actually list all the pages you've created You can edit and delete them from there you can list and upload files, which is great just like Edu blogs if you tuned into my other presentation earlier this week You can actually upload word documents excel documents powerpoint pdf so forth Images of various kinds into wiki spaces and share those as links great stuff In fact, we can even go over that right now to list and upload files You click there Browse for a file in this case. I'll grab that iPhoto agenda I grabbed the other day Then click send file just as easy as doing an attachment to an email again And while it's uploading that file It gives you Some syntax you can use here just with the double brackets on either side to include an image or a file in your In one of your pages Also show you how to do that in the editor But basically under manage space Upload new file You can view and upload any files That you need to upload to your site Under usage statistics You can also see paid views and some other statistics about your site This might become interesting to you as more and more people use and visit your site Uh and importing a blog entry might be interesting to you if you're blogging somewhere and you want that to appear On your wiki now the space settings. I think are perhaps the most interesting ones Oh, let me not gloss too quickly over this you want to back up your space or export your space You can do that as well That's even though it's a reliable service over at wiki space is not a bad idea to back up your own space Now space settings we can come into name description and license There we can change the name if we want add a description if we like We can even change the license under which we're sharing this wiki By default it's shared under a creative commons attribution share alike license Which means that others can copy distribute display and perform your copyrighted work But only if they give you credit And that you allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license Identical to the license that governs your work if you like you can also limit derivative works and non-commercial use of your work In addition, you've got the option of using the GNU free documentation license if you like or no license Okay back to manage space You can also manage members and permissions here If you have your students or other teachers at your site make their own wiki spaces accounts You can then add them as members here either their wiki spaces username or their email So for instance if you're working with a grade level team or a subject area team in a high school Or any sort of professional learning community you can add everybody as a member to the page Then they'll have special privileges such as being able to create new pages within your wiki space and Being able to revert to pages and that sort of thing Back to manage space There are some subscription settings But for the most part I presume you all are going to be using the free subscription And you can of course request space deletion if you need that to happen You can also invite people to use your space and you can put space badges such as the samples shown here On your blog or other web space to link to your space This badge is the one that you'll see on an edgy blog by default and it actually shows the space menu So you can click link through directly to resources From your other website Okay, I seem to have skipped look and feel so i'm going to click on look and feel Because this is the place you might actually want to make the most changes There's a couple of themes available, but they're not significant differences So i'm going to skip that and go down into colors I like to show this option see how there's this gray color around the edge You can make a really really clean looking wiki by coming here and picking the color For the background color setting it to white and saving that setting Now i've got this really clean wiki where it's all just white with the blue links and the black text You could of course set the colors to whatever you like for text color and so on If you upgrade your account or your subscription here you can actually use css to Customize your wiki style sheet. You can also customize your logo Again, it's as easy as adding an attachment to an email click on browse In this case, I downloaded wiki logo From the wikipedia just found it with a quick Google search The thing is the logo has to be 150 by 150 pixels or less in order to Fit on wiki spaces. So I picked one that was Exactly that small actually if you save that Your new logo will now actually appear in the upper left hand area of the page Now I don't know that I actually have permission to use this logo or not, but Shall surf for the demo Okay, so we've gone over all of the other actions we can do Within a wiki space and earlier We looked at all the tabs such as edit discussion and history There's only a few other options here for us We can go up into settings And we can actually input Some information for our profile here putting my real name Perhaps upload another picture Change your time zone And some other options here and of course Hit save Notice when I'm on settings here Or my account for that matter I have left the Particular space I was working on before my wiki workspace, and I'm just at www.wiki spaces.com and dialed down into my user here Now remember earlier I showed you I had all these spaces available If I want to get back to my wiki workspace, I can come back down here and click on wiki work Here's the wiki I created to support this presentation to wiki while you work Of course I could always come in and type in the address up to here, but I'm going to go ahead and go back to my demo Here we are Now before I wrap up the hands-on section I want to actually show you some examples of educational wikis One that Eva talked about is hmtech www.wiki spaces.com And here you'll see her page for a hudmuffin technology resources She's got lesson archives for kindergarten through fourth grade at this point Again, as she said kindergarten is most well populated because that's where she's done her work You can cruise through look at any particular theme dial down for instance on Theme two week two and you can find links that relate to phonemic awareness High-frequency words comprehension skills and oral language that they're working on and so forth Including centers with games for kids that are relevant So anybody who's using the Houghton Mifflin language series particularly in california can contribute to this simply by clicking edit this page Another example she mentioned was her tech tips dot wiki spaces dot com It's just a similar sort of thing Technology integration projects for kindergarten through third grade We also talked to Dave Conley who runs the Aristotle experiment See if I can type that right at wiki spaces dot com There we go See a picture of Estancia high school and at the bottom of the page Oh, there we are picture Dave and his wife who also teaches english. There's some of Dave's students, which is a new edition Including something called beatbox.mp4 You can check out the grammar vocabulary projects. He was talking about or even the web projects. He was talking about including Moby dick theater And over here on the right the group project pages So feel free to explore that I also don't want to quit without Sending you guys to a resource from a great presentation. I saw at NECC At ahistoryteacher.com slash NECC 2006 You'll find Dan McDowell's choose your own wiki adventure using wikis with k12 students And he's got lots of great examples here Including a holocaust wiki project Progression of events charts ap world history using a wiki Industrial revolution project using a wiki all kinds of great stuff and additional links So Dan's work is a good resource and there's tons more out there Start digging start doing some searches of your own for educational wikis And if you have any questions certainly contact me or any of the organizers of this conference Well, that was sort of a whirlwind But uh, hopefully you learned something you can always replay it you can always come back to it And you can certainly always seek help online Now before we go we do need to review Some of the benefits and some of the concerns Or drawbacks related to using these tools in the classroom We're gonna do the anchor thing here In fact my sources tell me there are five major benefits to using wikis in education First one is engagement and motivation Our students are digital natives. They already enjoy using these technologies They're interactive and responsive. They're certainly personalized Everybody's making their own contributions to it And they appeal to multiple learning styles. They've had mp3 files and videos on the Aristotle experiment Context is important students access process and create information that's meaningful to them You saw how they have an authentic purpose and an authentic audience when they're writing on a wiki or sharing other media on a wiki And again, it's all about content and communication not the technology This is transparent stuff here folks, you know, even if you're it's there's a learning curve while you're starting um Promotes inquiry again, they've talked about it students discover explore and contribute to topics that they find interesting They're solving authentic problems Again, it's individually individualized and it's certainly more empowering than a textbook Collaboration is important in these tools Even more so than in a blog Students connect with peers and experts this way They can be experts this way And again experts can contribute to their work and vice versa your kids can contribute to wikipedia They they certainly practice interpersonal skills as they work with each other And they are definitely practicing with the tools of the 21st century workplace Again, it's results oriented stuff. They've got to have a product Um not as much as blogs, but wiki certainly do encourage some reflection the sort of planning and and Seeing the histories and how these things grow encourages metacognition, particularly if it's facilitated by a teacher like you But unfortunately there there are still the concerns to consider and uh And they're numerous at the first of course are the information literacy concerns from the wikipedia to the proliferation of other wikis On other topics including the ones you and your students will make Relevance is an issue with this much information out there the source students need to be able to identify or at least question what the source is and Sort out if there's any agenda or bias behind it They've got to be able to check their facts wikipedia for example is a great place to start research, but Your students need to be able to back up their facts somewhere else Um and of course identifying trusted sources is going to go a long way to making that easier Unfortunately when anyone can click edit and post whatever they want inappropriate content is going to be an issue We've got to protect our students against offensive sexual or violent content We've got to show due diligence in this effort. That may mean filth drink from time to time But uh, I hope it doesn't mean that we're blocking all wikis and all blogs everywhere um Ultimately we've got to develop appropriate responses to be inevitable and we've got to uh teach our students that uh They're gonna come across inappropriate material and then Turning the other way quickly closing the window letting the teacher know about it Certainly not drawing attention of other kids to it is it's going to be ways to deal with it Of course now students too can post the very material we're trying to protect them from They can post inappropriately, unsafely, irresponsibly Provocatively and they can share illicit or legal behavior online. So we want to steer them clear of them have these conversations with them Perhaps the most serious thing our students could post is threats. They could get into cyber bullying Threats that impact the tenants and academics are a school concern according to california ed coded anyway An incredible threats may be a criminal matter Of course the flip side of this is free speech concerns students at least in california do have first amendment rights and parity is protected We can't control the students, but we can educate them Intellectual property is another issue It's very easy for students to uh cut and paste or post media that they don't have rights to to post Uh, of course academic honesty is related. We've got to talk to our students about that again The history function on a wiki might help out as will the discussion functions Um and and introduce your kids to alternative licenses like the creative commons license that this This presentation is shared under creative commons.org Fraud and identity theft are an issue even for kids They can put their friends and family at risk, but they too can lose their identity and lose passwords and and usernames Uh, but most importantly Stalkers and predators perhaps not most importantly, but most seriously most gravely Stalkers and predators are a concern. Uh, we've always got to tell our students not to share Personal information identifying information online and and again if you're going to use wikis with your class I recommend sending home a cover letter and a permission slip that explicitly describes what you're doing and Seeks apparent permission to do that with the students And of course even so we always recommend using pseudonyms another perspective here is that All of this ability for anyone to exercise their voice online allows for citizen journalism citizen police work We're averting disasters and crimes all the time because of things that are posted online Threats suicide and risky behavior are often reported Sting operations actually do catch criminals Um ultimately though the biggest Concern right now is that the lack of understanding that a lot of people including educators and legislators have about these tools and and The backlash against them Fortunately, I think you all have taken a big first step if you've listened to this whole presentation and gotten your feet wet with wikis understanding these and using them yourself is the first step towards uh Not being afraid of the tools Okay, so that wasn't the most graceful edit in this presentation But it's time to get this project up on the shelf and move on to something else Once again, I'm thrilled that you were here with me for this presentation thrilled to have this opportunity to present to the k-12 online conference and I do need to acknowledge my indebtedness to bloggers and authors such as uh David warlick and will richardson whose books i've read and his blogs i've read for ages and the other Almost 400 people i'm subscribed to because a lot of these ideas of course came from there Uh, but at this point I'm gonna say good night or good day or whatever happened at time it happens to be there and uh, As I said put the project on the shelf and move on to something else Hope to see you guys again soon. Please feel free to contact me anytime at mark at edtechlife.com Bye