The words from the movie ‘Die Hard 4‘ “You are an analog man in a digital time.” aptly describes the current education dilemma.The excitement about learning about the variety of ways that students can be engaged is quelled by the thought that for the most part the basic infrastructure simply does not exists. Those thoughts aside the possibilities for the usage of technology in the classroom are the beginnings of a radical change in the way we learn. “We” as in just about all the stakeholders in education.
Wiki is Hawaiian for quick and it is an easily learned, open-source software program that allows all users to access and edit the pages on an ongoing basis (Dobson, in press;Luce-Kapler & Dobson, 2005) as cited in “Radical Change and Wikis:Teaching new literacies by Rebecca Luce- Kapler. The article makes a compelling argument for the use of wikis in the classroom as it provides a manageable way in which students can collaborate in a given class activity without the constraints of most regular group activities. The interesting thing about wikis is that its usage is not exclusive to the students, teachers can also use this software to plan lessons and activities.
The major limitation though is the analog system within which teaching and learning happens, the trick is to use the resources that are available to make the case for the use of technology in classrooms and beyond.
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ReplyDeleteOver the past year I have been able to experiment with the use of a wiki in my classroom. Despite having no access to the Internet I created a class website using a free template provided by weebly.com. The students were given the website and it was used to place extra activities and games related to the topics that I was teaching. The responsibility was laid on the parents and children to visit the website. The idea spread throughout our department and all of the teachers in the standard four departments tried it out. To motivate the children to visit the website whenever we had an event, a display, a function or a field trip pictures were taken and uploaded to the website as our photo gallery. It caught on slowly but I believe that by now at least eighty percent of the children visit the website. It has also provided an avenue for us to communicate with the children over this vacation period as the engage in their independent studies. A blog was also included for them to communicate with each other. However they are using it more like a chat. It all seems really great but it can be time consuming at times. I must say at times it was tempting to fall off of this technology trail but I am really glad I stuck to it.
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