The Lamppost Blog

I’ve had a great Friday so far.

I thought for a long time (an hour is a big time investment) about the new-to-me concept of using a wiki for class collaboration. After reading Mr. B-G’s post about wikis, and as a result checking out Kristin’s “Not-So-Intimidating World of Wiki“, I felt emboldened. I hunted around and found some examples of wikis being used in ways that I think fit my own teaching style; a favourite was discoveryisms, which connects in so many ways to the English course I’ve re-organized around life’s big questions.

I ended up checking out free wiki hosting options. Wetpaint was ruled out almost immediately: despite its nice themes, it asks for a birth date to sign in (what’s with that?) and members of private spaces have to be emailed invitations. (I make a point of not collecting student email addresses.) I couldn’t find any examples of pbwiki use that I really liked. And not being so emboldened as to want a public wiki yet, I landed with a nice, safe private one (free for teachers) at Wikispaces. So now I will have the fun of launching an experiment in online collaboration with my Grade 12 English students this semester.

But that’s not all, nor is it even the best part. Another Grade 12 English teacher at our school, who has also set up a blog for his class, is interested in having his students participate in the brand-new wiki that I’ve launched.

I’m already benefiting from having another person thinking about and working on this with me. He has suggested that we create groups containing students from both classes to work on specific parts of the wiki, thus enabling cross-class collaboration. All sorts of possibilities are opening up here.

And my third bit of good news for the day: I’m going to have a working LAN in my classroom this semester! No more screen shots of interesting online texts for my classes. This is a very generous move on the part of our school IT person, who himself is a busy teacher and doesn’t need the extra work that comes with supporting teachers’ connections in the classroom. I am very grateful.

On top of all of this, it’s Friday. All around a great day.

I am a rookie when it comes to using technology in the classroom, and the unfamiliar makes me wary. I appreciated reading about another educator’s cautions in Mr. B-G’s English Blog: Wiki wannabe

Web 2.o is about control, authorship, and authority. Students aren’t getting the full experience because I still hold the reigns. I suppose I do it out of caution.

I am the only teacher at my high school who is posting student work to a blog for all the world to see. I am meaning to move beyond using my class blog pages as a place for displaying student work. I’d like each of my kids to have their own space where they upload class content and harness the connective powers of the Internet to move the discourse beyond the limitations of our classroom’s four walls.

I get this. I, too, am the only teacher at my high school currently using blogs with my classes. This is unsettling because I miss the usual level of collaboration with my colleagues. My principal and department head are very open to using technology and new forms of expression, as long as students’ privacy is respected and everyone is kept safe. That’s great.

Some have been less enthusiastic about teachers setting up websites and blogs. I can understand their concern on one point — teachers are already incredibly overworked, and once a few teachers start setting up these types of class structures, the pressure on other teachers to create online classroom spaces might be unrealistic.

But … the truth is I’ve found that my class website is beginning to save me almost as much time as it takes. A student loses an assignment? They go to the class site to get it, and I don’t have to send home extras or have them on hand to distribute. Someone misses a class? They can download any presentations that were shared.

Without having had a classroom to claim as “mine” yet, I haven’t been putting up posters, displaying student work, and just creating that physical space that makes a class thrive. My website has provided that for me, and students have loved it. It’s taken some time and energy, but not any more than that given by my colleagues in creating their physical classroom environment.

Like Mr. B-G, I am wondering if a wiki could be a new extension of my virtual classroom, allowing more 2.0 functionality.

A new semester is starting, and along with it I get a new classroom to call home for 3 periods each day. Not surprisingly, it is a fairly run-down room, with a lost blind, missing window screens, gouged plaster where students are carving it away, a broken projection screen, and ripped out wires in the PA system. I learned from a colleague that this list of things to fix has existed for several years, yet requests for replacement or repair have not been answered because of budget constraints.

It got me thinking of an idea I read in The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell), which the author calls “The Power of Context” or the broken window theory. In brief, the idea is that epidemics can be reversed by tinkering with the smallest details. For example, crime can be slowed by cleaning up grafitti and fixing broken windows. So I’m wondering what might happen if we were to actually fix what’s wrong in this classroom. They’re all small things when compared to the need for class texts … BUT together they add up to an atmosphere that suggests apathy.

So I’m going to try to fix what I can and give the room a good cleaning. And hope that this year the budget allows us to do more about my to-fix list.

Tags: Classroom, tipping point