How WIKIS Work

What is a Wiki?

Wikis perform a very useful service in a simple way. A wiki allows a group of people to enter and communally edit bits of text. These bits of text can be viewed and edited by anyone who visits the wiki.
This simplicity and the utter openness of a wiki cause many people to instantly reject the idea. They assume that because anyone can edit a wiki at any time, the wiki must be flawed. But wiki supporters claim this is an incorrect assumption.
A wiki is nothing but a collection of Web pages interconnected with each other through internal links.

Introduction to How Wikis Work

The most famous example of a wiki is called "Wikipedia", a massive online encyclopedia. Wikipedia has become so large (more than a million articles) that you run across it all the time in the search engine "Google".

The Creation of Wikipedia Pages

At the top of the page in Wikipedia, you see a tab that says, "Edit this page." That is a wide-open invitation to anyone – any visitor to Wikipedia (including you) can edit any page.
The idea that anyone can come to Wikipedia and edit any page at any time and do so with complete anonymity is extremely disconcerting.
Obvious questions arise immediately:

*What if the person doing the typing has no idea what he/she is talking about?

*What if the person is a vandal and inserts profanity?

*What if the person is a vandal and either completely erases the page or corrupts it?

*What if the person is a spammer from a porn site who adds porn links and pictures to the page?

>The key thing that makes a wiki work is its community.<

Understanding a Wiki Community

Each person who arrives is able to play one or more roles on the site. For example:

*The large majority of people who visit Wikipedia are readers. They arrive at Wikipedia for whatever reason and read one or more articles.

*Some people who visit Wikipedia become writers. They add a new section to an existing article or create a brand new article.

*Many people act as editors. If they see an error on a page they are reading, they correct it. If they can make a small addition that is helpful, they will do it on the spot.

*Several hundred visitors who have been contributing to Wikipedia for a period of time are granted administrator privileges. These privileges give them the right to do things like deleting and un-deleting pages, blocking and unblocking IP addresses, etc.

Writers, editors, and administrator’s work together to solve almost all of the problems that you would expect to arise in an open platform like Wikipedia.

Experiment: Changing a Page

The number one best way to understand how a wiki community works is to "Test it out Yourself" and go to a place like Wikipedia and add something. The Wikipedia community will react to your change in some way. Your change could be accepted, altered, or rejected by the community. This is how pages on Wikipedia are expanding and changing all the time.

Community Tools

Wikipedia has a more personal tool called a Watchlist. By adding that page to your watchlist, you will get notified every time the page changes.

*Each page in Wikipedia has a Revision History that anyone can see.

*A list of all changed pages is also compiled on a Recent Changes page. Anyone can go to this page at any time to see all of the pages that are changing in Wikipedia.

Vandalism and Edit Wars

It is easy for a person to vandalize Wikipedia. However, there are tools that make it easy for the community to find and remove vandalism. For example:

*It is easy for anyone who sees vandalism to revert pages back to a pre-vandalism state.

*It is easy for any user to alert the rest of the Wikipedia community to vandalism that is in progress.

*It is possible for an administrator to block or ban users (or IP addresses) who are persistently destructive.

*It is possible for an administrator to protect a page temporarily to keep people from changing it.

*It is possible for an administrator to delete an inappropriate page.

A subtler, less intentional form of vandalism, called an "edit war," can also occur on a wiki. In an edit war, two or more people edit or revert pages over and over again in order to express their point of view.
Edit wars can happen on any wiki, but on a large wiki like Wikipedia, they can reach epic proportions. The best way to understand an edit war is to look at a battleground page and use it as an example – Wikipedia's page about George W. Bush, for example.
It is easy to understand why the George W. Bush page might be a battleground. There are many people who love George W. Bush, and there are many people who despise him. Edit wars like this are completely natural and to be expected.
Both parties have to reach consensus on the page, and that eventually causes the page to achieve a neutrality and objectivity that satisfies both parties.

Many Topics, Many Wikis

There are thousands of other wikis on the Internet now. As a genre, wiki sites are growing rapidly. Here are several examples:
*WikiTravel
*WikiHow
*Wiktionary
*SwitchWiki - a large directory of wikis
Virtually any topic with any sort of active community can, in theory, support a wiki. A wiki gives the community a way to gather information together and modify it as things change.
It is now common to see wikis used inside corporations and organizations. It is quite likely that wikis and other community-based efforts will grow rapidly as people become familiar and more comfortable with the concept.

Wikis in the Classrooms

"Using Wikipedia would be a helpful search tool in the classroom. Teachers could use this resource to create virtual field trips, storyboards, etc. Students could use this sight to do research on the web (with the correct controls of websites). I feel that Wiki could play an important but also a safe role for the classroom," explains Miller.

"I definitely think that Wiki is a very good tool to have in a classroom. It is a good tool to use for research. You could also let older children actually publish on Wiki. I feel that is a tool you can teach young children how to use and then they can carry it on with them as they get older," states Newpher.

Links

• 
  
  http://computer.howstuffworks.com/wiki.htm


• 
  
  Wikipedia.org

Digital Imagery/Photography

Teaching Digital Photography
Digital cameras are becoming more and more popular, especially for classroom use. They have many advantages: pictures are immediately available, pictures are saved in graphic format, and they are easily transferred from the camera to the computer.

Photography is not just about pointing and pressing a button; it's a decision-making process. One of the best reasons for working photography into your activities and projects is that it helps kids better understand the media images they're bombarded with every day.

Photography is also just plain fun, and it's a wonderful foundation for community-based projects. If you introduce photography properly, it helps kids look much more carefully at the world around them. Kids understand media images when photography is involved.

Digital imagery and photography is also a great way for teachers to get their students to interact more and "think out of the box." By taking pictures of shapes, objects, and even cultures around them, they can learn more hands on. There are several different ways teachers can use digital photography in their lesson plans and it creates yet another way to break up their lesson plans with fun activities!

Using Digital Photography in Your Classroom
Photography helps students that are visual learners see what they are learning. This type of activity helps kids see the world around them through a different perspective and can also help them be more creative with projects.

Handling the Digital Camera

Step 1: Model by randomly snapping pictures while talking about the project or just talking (w/the camera strap around your neck-be a good role model).

Step 2: Next, model how to pair-share or hand the camera. Plus, show how much you trust the kids with the camera.

Step 3: Demonstrate the pair-share in front of the class using the correct word, such as "hand".

Step 4: Now make a circle on the floor and have all the children participate in a huge pair-sharing experience.

Lesson Plan Ideas
1. Geometric shapes in the real world
Students investigate their surroundings looking for objects/shapes they have been learning about in Geometry.
Have students take pictures of buildings, goal posts, parking lot lines, busses, etc and make flashcards for each shape.
You can take the pictures and give them to students and ask them to find how many of a specific shape are in that picture (think of how many rectangles appear when you take a picture of the front of your school).

2. Create a Photo Book Report
In addition to writing an essay, have your students include photographs of themselves posing as the characters in their story. Edit the photos (if necessary) and insert them into a PowerPoint presentation. 3 branches of government? Pose your students as presidents, judges, and senators and then use those pictures in a PowerPoint organizational chart.

3. Ancient Culture vs. Modern Day
Have students take pictures of modern day objects and compare them to pictures of those same objects from ancient times.

4. Alphabet Photo Book
Have students brainstorm the names of objects that start with each letter of the alphabet. Assign each student a different letter and have him or her take pictures of objects that start with their letter.
Add these to a PowerPoint presentation or scrapbook and show it to parents at Open House. It would make a very nice addition if you took a picture of each student and added that picture to their PowerPoint slide or scrapbook page.

5. Community History – History is All Around Us
Assign students to go out and take pictures of historic or civic buildings, senior citizens, local collections, antiques, and even headstones.
Use these pictures in a PowerPoint presentation or even put together a time capsule full of pictures.
Personal Opinions
“As a student I know I learn better through the eye. I would much rather look at something and learn about it, rather then just sit and listen about something. Much more fun! Learning to use the digital camera to take pictures allows students to learn "out side the box". Teachers can take the time necessary to teach the students the proper way to work the camera and respect the camera this way the camera is taken care of. The camera can become a new way of learning.” -Leah Zaremba

Virtual Field Trips

What exactly is a Virtual Field Trip?
A virtual field trip is a field trip that you can do right in your own classroom. It gives you the same benefits as a regular field trip except for leaving the classroom. Virtual field trips can get students out of the classroom without ever opening the door. They are designed to be entertaining and educational.

Where can you go on a Virtual field trip?
You can go anywhere with a virtual field trip. Students can take a trip around globe right from the comfort and convenience of the desk in the classroom they go to everyday. You can explore other planets or follow researchers across the frozen terrain of Antarctica. The Internet gives you so many choices to help your children learn more about everything and anything. With all the advances in technology virtual field trips make so much sense.

How can you create a virtual field trip?
Anyone who is computer literate can create a virtual field trip. "It's as simple as taking a camera with you on a normal field trip outside the classroom." All you have to do is upload several photos of the topic you want to explore on your trip and add them to your class website. Its as easy as that!

Benefits of Virtual Field Trips:

• Schools will save money, because when you take a actual field trip, you have to be able to take a bus and be able to pay for the gas for that bus and sometimes kids have to pay admission to get into certain places.
• Teachers don't have to worry about finding enough chaperons to accompany the kids on trips.
• Virtual field trips can take kids to places they never dreamed of visiting. For example the Mars, the Grand Cannon, Antarctica, or even Time Square in New York City.

Some Personal Thoughts On Virtual Field Trips?

"As an aspiring teacher I definitely plan on using virtual field trips in my classroom. Hopefully this blog will help other aspiring teachers or current teacher the see the limitless possibilities in their classrooms with virtual field trips." Below is a link to a website with valuable information on virtual field trips.

Links To Virtual Field Trip sites:

http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech071.shtml

Storyboarding Multimedia

-What is a storyboard?
A storyboard is a plan for teaching and learning activities. For example, one can use visual aids, audio voices, and videos.

-What are the advantages of using storyboarding?
Some advantages to storyboarding are that they help show the "total content" of the program. Also by using storyboards, problems with the program can be spotted more easily, which will save time and money in the long run.
Storyboarding also helps speed up the Content-writing phase because this phase is the most unpredictable. Storyboarding helps the creator view the project as a whole (a bigger picture) rather than several different pieces of the program.
Beware:
Storyboarding is not a substitute for paper-based documentation. It's more of an aid to help better your program (lesson) and helps you sort out the kinks before you present the program/lesson.

I really like the idea of using storyboarding in the classroom because it helps teacher look at the bigger picture, helps sort out the problems with the lesson before its given, and it also adds another dimension to teaching with technology.

If you would like to visit the article and read more about storyboarding the link is:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/adrian_mallon_multimedia/story.htm