Wikis

Are a fabulous, interactive tool that engages students to be creative while deepening their knowledge with a topic that they are engaging with.
I am looking forward to implementing Wikis into my classroom. My ideas for my Englsih classroom include: writing a newspaper article, creating an advertisement or home page for a charity organisation. This would require the learners to engage in real world situations within their community and therefore develop an understanding of what is going on in their negihbourhood. It would highlight any problem areas and the learners would need to offer soluitons to these problems.
In my PE theory classroom it would be a textbook or paper regarding different bodily functions or systems. You could swithc topics every copule of weeks so that by the end of the year you had a complete classroom encylopedia. The learners could then use these to study for up coming exams.
The ICT Learning Design Model (Adapted from Oliver, 1999) is evident when using Wiki as a tool in the classroom. 1. Learning Tasks - should be broad enough to enage students with the key content areas. This section of the model relies on the teacher selecting something of real world value for the student to engage with and can be achieved by chosing something that is relevant to the child or the community. 2. Learning Resources - Wiki as a resource ensures that the learners can be creatively engaged. 3. Learning Supports - If the goal is for the learner to gather information that can later be used for a exam review then this can also be achieved using Wiki as it becomes a permanent record for the learner to refer to many times over.