Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending four hours in Elluminate with Sheryl and a dozen or so of the schools that we’re working with from the Southeastern states for PLP holding a “work session” around the culminating projects they’ll be presenting next month. And though I know the idea of spending four hours doing anything online is overwhelming for a lot of folks, I do mean it when I say “pleasure.” Their projects, by and large, blew me away in terms of their scope and thoughtfulness, and it was apparent that most of them were really beginning to understand the network creation and expansion part of this. And it was great to see the extent to which these ideas seemed to be taking hold in their schools. (We’ll be sharing these out down the road.)
But while it wasn’t a central focus of most of the projects, for some reason what’s really stuck in my head are the conversations we had about those that revolved around using these technologies for articulation. And the more I thought about it, the more natural a starting point it seemed for schools who are trying to adopt (or adapt to) these technologies. I’m often struck by how many times I hear about the lack of communication, the isolation of teachers, the inconsistency of the teaching and pedagogy in schools and districts. And those are all things that teachers lounges and monthly department meetings can’t really assuage.
I know it would require some front end loading, but if districts were using wikis to house curriculum and encouraging teachers to work off of them as they move through the year, noting, tweaking, fine tuning, reflecting, etc., it would be one way that they could begin to make good use of a Web 2.0 tool and make it easier to connect to what other folks are doing. Not to mention the growing of some very important local network connections (which then, of course, could be expanded out.) And the other piece, of course, is that it’s a “safe” way to get started at least in terms of not having to deal with student participation issues.
And when you think about it even for just a few seconds longer, it’s not hard to come up with all sorts of other ways to create a rich curriculum “text” if you will that could include videos of lessons, links to resources and artifacts, and the general throwing around of ideas that could potentially deepen the impact of what’s happening in the classroom.
Or not. There is the time issue, the buy in issue, and other issues. But I’m sure there are some good examples of this already out there, aren’t there?
Will, I really like your idea of front end loading by using a wiki for curriculum. Our school is working on curriculum mapping and the thought was to put the maps in a database. Since I am the one who will have to do this- and I know diddly about making a new database- I planned to do this with a wiki, since they seem to work just like a database. (Is that what’s behind the easy interface?) To me this would make this work into a living breathing document, not like all of the admin paperwork that seems to be completed just for the sake of making a new file to sit and collect dust.
The new tools available are easy to use and accessible. If this mapping project can be made with a web 2.0 tool and I can get some buy-in, I am hoping that it will provide another way to influence tech use at my school.
I proposed using a wiki for parent-teacher sign-ups… it would be an interesting social experiment to watch parents (and teachers) edit the posted schedules online.
Have you looked into Hotchalk?
FYI – many wikis are backended by databases. There are lots of free wikis, so you can (if you don’t mind you data being hosted on someone else’s hardware) get that job done without too much effort or ‘under the covers’ knowhow.
Vic
Will, we use Atlas curriculum mapping software, which allows much of what you describe–planning, sharing of resources (both print and online), connecting through email, connecting to other schools’ maps, the ability to share or move curriculum maps. It’s not web 2.0 and doesn’t fully allow for the networking we see online, but it’s a start. However, having a map isn’t the only answer and won’t address the inconsistency in teaching and pedagogy. That’s an even bigger shift in my mind.
ok… so I had this moment in my district about a year ago and developed a series of wikipages linked and ready to go http://fusd1.wikispaces.com/ The powers that be were concerned about this, that and the other and for that reason the site has sat really, quite unused. I was hoping it would be a common space for educators in the district to connect, collaborate and share resources… the whole work smarter, not harder mantra. I am starting to think I need to readdress the admin about sending this out to all teachers and see if they will buy in. I think I will in fact do that tomorrow.
Maureen and Susan… just a thought, a google doc might be another way to share that information… especially with the curriculum maps, most maps can be exported as a spreadsheet and then uploaded to allow for a more fluid conversation to develop online with collaboration.
Diana, Maureen & Susan,
We are using Google Docs for aligning our district information literacy standards and benchmarks with the new ISTE NETS – it is working really well! We can have teachers across 30 schools work on the project without face to face meetings. We are also using wikis for creating common assessments in Language Arts & Social Studies, as well as working on our district solution for assessing 8th grade technology literacy. This has been a fantastic way to get people over their fear of Web 2.0 and to start to see the huge potential for these tools in the classroom. And – as a result, this week I am working on drafting our district’s first policy for classroom blogs and wikis — so we’ll be opening these up for student use. Hurray!
As the Language Arts department chair at my middle school, I laughed when I read your post, as it mimics a conversation that I had with my department this morning at our Professional Learning Community meeting. We have these massive, lonely curriculum binders in our district that collect dust because they are not user-friendly. We recently revised our Language Arts binder and when I mentioned to our Curriculum Coordinator that I did not want a traditional binder, the best that he could offer is that everyone would get a copy on a CD. I plan to spend part of the summer transferring the document (and adding to it) making it into something vibrant, using Web 2.0 tools However, I get overwhelmed when I try to figure out the best way to make this a breathing entity, a place that my colleagues will want to visit, will want to add to, and will want to use. The documents include our Belief Statements about teaching Language Arts, along with lesson ideas. I would love to know about other Districts that have used Web 2.0 tools for this purpose and to hear any ideas about which tools would be most effective.
Will: Earlier this year 5th grade students in my class watched videos produced by Mr. Mayo’s 8th grade class and they watched one we made and then we video-Skyped and critiqued each others … 2500 miles apart. The aha! moment came when he mentioned how it was easier to collaborate with us over Skype than it was to collaborate with the elementary school connected to their building (or maybe across the street) because of scheduling issues and attitudes. BTW we will be Vid-Skyping with and possibly Ustreaming a meeting between my 5th graders and Lisa Parisi’s 5th graders in NY Thursday so our students can discuss the collaborative writing project they are working on using Google Docs. Here is the project wiki:
http://classroombooktalk.wikispaces.com/Mysteries+of+Harris+Burdick
Brian
Very cool Brian,
Keep doing all this great work that I can show to other teachers in my travels. Your modeling the best potentials of these tools in some really creative ways. (You too Lisa.)
Brian, I am interested in how you setup the your skype session. How did you find each other and how difficult was it to get ‘authorization’. Did you have to do any work in order to gt through your firewall etc.
I see skype (both audio and video) as a great way to connect small groups for free. Couple that with Brio or wizIQ, some voicethread, etc and you’ve more than a good start on a collaborative classroom.
How did your student like it?
Vic
I think this is an extremely good ideas. I’m an education student at Illinois State University right now, and we are using a wiki in one of my classes to create a group project, and it is so helpful! I am not a huge technology person, and I’m not that advanced in making websites or anything like that, but the wiki is so easy to use. My groupmates and I can post there, show each other different sites, and really communicate when we can’t meet face to face. So I completely agree with you, that the use of this web-page could be really helpful for teachers to keep their curriculum consistent for the students. It could also open up a lot of lines of communication between teachers that may be within one district, but working at different schools. What a great way to share knowledge and ideas!
Will,
It has likely been 5 years now, that we put our curriculum on a Wiki. Our lead teachers copy/pasted what we had previously, and created the wiki pages themselves. We paid them to do this crunch work.
But the natural evolution you speak of, and that I’ve tried to encourage, hasn’t happened. That is, the constant tweaking, alternation, an updating isn’t happening. While every teacher has read access, they only want the privileged few to make changes. Adopting a wiki, democratic culture takes time.
As I helped two employees today clean our a closet, we found so much stuff that had been printed, put into big binders, and was no longer being used. We tossed almost all of it. It makes perfect sense to have reference documents online, and in wiki format.
But access is another hurdle. I’m all for seeing wiki-based textbooks (even ones that the kids help create.) But that is not going to happen without 1:1.
Sometimes we ourselves are so fluid (i.e., fluent) with technology we can taste the future. But you are right, a lot of time, acculturation, and money will be spent before we see it all before us.
And that’s tough, because the textbook companies must be thinking about this too. Their business model has to change, but I am not sure how it can. Any ideas? Subscription fees? And would it really be a wiki then–I doubt they’d let me muck up their content by adding/subtracting to/from it? But maybe I’m wrong.
I will be fighting (I know, I can sense it like a storm) folks (teachers, administrators) who will still insist on using desktop tools like Word/Excel when Google’s option is leaner and far more powerful by nature of its collaborative power. But you have to push here and there, and start in small patches… I’ve been patient enough to see change happen. Sometimes it takes 3-5 years, but it can come.
Hey John,
Thanks for the comment. I’m sure your story is not unique. What I’m wondering is how do we incentivize staff to use the wiki. And I’m trying to think out of the box a bit here, wishing I could remember where I read the article about a company that gave bonuses to employees who updated the wiki until it simply became a part of their culture. I’m sure that wouldn’t fly in school districts, but I’m wondering if there might be some other way of getting people started without simply relying on altruism or on people seeing the inherent benefits of collaboration.
I think the best method to get folks on board with using the wiki is to make it the sole method of communication within a certain area. We use wikis every day in what we do administratively, and I set up a wiki for one of our principals who now uses it exclusively for inter-school communications. You might categorize it as a top-down expectation.
I mean, when you have a school leader walking down the hall, and saying “That was a great lesson idea; would you put that on the wiki? I’d like to highlight it at our faculty meeting… thanks!” you are going to start wikiculture in your school.
Eventually you get teachers that then come to you asking for a wiki to use with their students.
But I think the curriculum is a different animal. It’s still sacred, like the Bible, in many minds. It takes committees and experts and demigods to touch one’s curriculum. So while the wiki is a great piece of tech, it alone won’t revolutionize school culture.
But it will be there, ready and waiting, when we are ready.
I am part of a team that is trying to do exactly what you’re suggesting. Our focus is on collaborative technology. We are mathematics based, but most of the technology is discipline agnostic. I invite you to visit http://collabvsl.wetpaint.com/
As noted in one of the comments, it is less about setting up a wiki and more about getting a critical mass of contributors. There is not shortage of folks that will read, but only a few consider adding content. And that is where the real value is .. at least for teachers.
There is some value for both teachers and students in just knowing about the technology/tools. There is far greater use in actually using those techniques.
The more I poke around, the more I find great tools, lessons and other materials.
Let’s make the web 2.0 e what we all see it can be.
Vic
Vic,
I agree that it’s not about making the wiki, but getting the collaboration to happen. How do you get that critical mass? That’s my stumbling block. I am teaching a moodle course on using web 2.0 tools for my school. I have 6 teachers 🙂 signed up. Hoping that I get a few more adopters to help move towards a critical mass for change. The curriculum mapping… I’m hopeful that our new incoming head of school will help make this a living, not a static wiki. It takes Dr. Doolittle’s pushme pullyou – both grass roots and admin support to really make this happen. I’ve been taking those baby steps for years- still trying, but the steps are so tiny!
We used local University connections to get an email list of the local county’s middle and high school math teachers. (A total of 6 counties). I did one by hand using info on the public school websites.
We ‘hoped’ that with several hundred emails out, we would get several dozen folks to ‘look’ and join. One can only guess how much of that email was treated as spam. I suspect a good portion of it 🙁
So far, we have gotten about 20 folks to join. Still, I have great expectations — and since most of the info I am adding is ‘stuff’ I will use, the effort is not wasted in any case.
Like any ‘site’, if it gets hot, it will get hammered with hits. I’ve been involved in many wikis and have found that a tipping point occurs when you get about 100 folks actively involved.
If you have any ideas on how to ‘get the word out’ I would love to hear them.
Vic
Can you kindly provide an example of what you or your students are doing?
I am a special education teacher (and tech junkie!) and co-teach across the curriculum at the secondary level. I started using wikispaces in my co-taught classes this year to create a central location for everyone to access all that is going on in a classroom–from notes, to video, to PPT, blogs…all the links in one place for the entire year. We are a relatively small school and for example this year we have 4 teachers teaching 7 sections of Physical Science. It is a nightmare for our special education staff to keep up with all that is going on in every teachers’ classroom in order to provide academic support to our students with learning disabilities. The wikispace is helping everyone stay up to speed as well as collaborate among each other. Like was previously mentioned…it is a back door way to get teachers using the wiki and opens up conversation about other ways to use it in the schools. It provides a sample for board members and administration as well. BONUS: The kids love it! Access to everything without having to ask for extra copies, missing notes, plus links to all sorts of cool stuff! 🙂
Hi Will,
Thanks to a presentation you delivered awhile ago I discovered wetpaint.com. I work as the support ICT consultant for our Board and I service K-12. I built a wiki to define read/write web opportunities out there like Google Docs and Twitter and so on. I have a teacher in every school designated as the resident computer expert. I am introducing them to the wiki with the hope they post their solutions to problems or answers to popular questions so it will benefit everyone. It has taken about about 3 months but I have replaced our IT newsletter with an ongoing blog which connects to the wiki for those that require more detail. I can know track what blogs and topics are popular and I can focus on them. I can also respond to current issues immediately. As was mentioned earlier it is a culture shift and it takes awhile but once it starts to go it really speeds up.
We are encouraging teachers to use wikis to support learning in and out of the class. We have some class wikis that are used for exam review. Each student was assigned a topic from the course and was responsible to summarize the highlights and post it. Extra credit was given to those students who edited other students work. Evaluating the project was easy since the wiki keeps track of every contribution by every user! The students post 43 pages of quality information in 3 days. The wiki can now be improved with future classes.
If anyone is interested visit http://sadwiki.wetpaint.com
There have been some great uses already mentioned for Google Docs. We are using Google Docs as a ONE WAY EMAIL address (DropBox) and for a Plagiarism Database. Google gives you an email address attached to your docs account that will allow for someone to email word, powerpoint, excel, etc. files to your account. The files will automatically be plucked from the email and placed into your docs account. You will not be able to reply or even know who sent the email. This is a great solution for those boards and Federations that are finicky about student email and contact.
Wikis have been a breath of fresh air for us!
Will,
A few commentators have mentioned Wetpaint. I work for Wetpaint in the Community Outreach deparment.
I was going to email you about a couple of stories that actually have something to do with this post.
It’s not so much about the administration organizing around a wiki, but one teacher in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan who used a wiki (and other web 2.0 tools) to connect with teachers across the globe. Her students join in and learn en masse.
They’re only in the 1st Grade. The URL is primarymath.wetpaint.com
There’s also another story about how one teacher’s use of a wiki opened up the curiculium and dialogue within her 8th Grade classroom.
Feel free to email me if you’re interested in any of these stories, I also have a ton more on our network that may be interesting.
Thanks,
Troy Morris