What content could this help you teach? I would like to introduce this to my classroom during our current unit, Learning to Learn by putting it on our class Web page. In order to promote collaboration I would post our Essential Questions: ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
• What do I need to help me learn?
• How do my learning needs change over time?
• How can I help others meet their learning needs?
• How might our learning change in the future?
I would ask for responses and encourage discussion. We could then build our list of how our learning has changed over our lives. I would ask each student to contribute one idea to each age group such as:
When I was 1 I learned to:
walk
talk
or eat with a spoon
I would also ask each student to post a photo of themselves as babies. We would continue through the age groups up to their current ages, 8-9. Each student would contribute one thing that they learned to do at different stages throughout their childhood and include a photo of themselves. We would constantly revisit the Essential Questions of this unit and update our understandings/answers to the questions as we explore our own learning further and further.
What type of pedagogical strategies might you use with your students?
I would present this Wiki both as something we work on together in class at the start and then I would ask students to go online at school and add to the Wiki and finally to continue to add to the Wiki at home. I would begin by presenting this Wiki to the whole class and showing them how to find, log on, and contribute to the Wiki. I would have students to work in small groups at the start when first exploring the Wiki. I would have them orally discuss the Essential Questions in their small groups to generate initial answers.
During the Unit I would ask students to comment on each others posts to fuel the collaboration and communication of this online discussion.
What technologies do you think would be harder to use with your students? Why?
When the Wiki is first introduced to the whole class I think that most students will need to spend time getting use to how to post on a Wiki because at the age of third graders very few have seen or taken part in an online discussion forum such as a this. For this reason we will begin as a whole class and students will work in small groups before making individual attempts. I feel that some students will struggle with how to upload photos and may need an adult to help in doing so. I also feel that those who's first language is not English will have a hard time following the Wiki and may need extra support in doing so such as teacher-student time to contribute and or an audio clip or screen cast to explain how to add to the Wiki when they are at home.