I survived the computer lab...
Ever taken 25 eleven-year-olds to the computer lab? In order to accomplish a specific task? That none of them had ever seen before?
It makes my skin crawl at the mere thought.
However, I took one of my groups of year 7 kids to the computer lab to work on a wiki. (What's a wiki, you ask? Better look here, but basically, it's a collaborative web document.) Yes, the hour was mostly frought with cries of, "What's the web address again?" "Huh?" "What's the password?" "My screen doesn't look like that!" and "Now what?!!" but they managed to produce simple pages. The point today wasn't to make great earth-shattering contributions to maths, but just to actually get logged in and make a page. All they had to do was type a sequence of numbers and explain it in words. But now that they know how, it will be much easier next week.
Here's ours. As you can see, there is a big range ability of things like spelling, proofreading, actually putting in the explanation, and making a proper sequence but we have 14 pages of mostly good work. The next steps might be reading the pages and having other pupils correct things, possibly do some proofreading, maybe comment on the explanations.
All I know is, I have 7 more days to prepare for the next session in the computer lab.
It makes my skin crawl at the mere thought.
However, I took one of my groups of year 7 kids to the computer lab to work on a wiki. (What's a wiki, you ask? Better look here, but basically, it's a collaborative web document.) Yes, the hour was mostly frought with cries of, "What's the web address again?" "Huh?" "What's the password?" "My screen doesn't look like that!" and "Now what?!!" but they managed to produce simple pages. The point today wasn't to make great earth-shattering contributions to maths, but just to actually get logged in and make a page. All they had to do was type a sequence of numbers and explain it in words. But now that they know how, it will be much easier next week.
Here's ours. As you can see, there is a big range ability of things like spelling, proofreading, actually putting in the explanation, and making a proper sequence but we have 14 pages of mostly good work. The next steps might be reading the pages and having other pupils correct things, possibly do some proofreading, maybe comment on the explanations.
All I know is, I have 7 more days to prepare for the next session in the computer lab.
posted by Matthew Reames at 9/14/2006 07:23:00 PM
1 Comments:
Hi Matthew,
I found you via Ewan.
I like the way you've structured your students introduction to wikis. It'll be interesting to see how they grow into the tool. ;-)
I've also used wikis with my classes. I blogged about it here, here and here. Thought you might be interested. ;-)
Cheers,
Darren
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