Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Permissions and Members

One of the things which is really great about wikispaces is that as an organizer of your sites you can have complete control over who sees and can contribute to your wiki. It is a bit confusing to get your head around having different wikis with different levels of access and permissions but it is worthwhile and something that Lee Stream is managing well. Bilinda Offen (Senior Class Teacher and Principal) is developing the school's wikis.

They are using the wiki to provide their families with a resource during snowdays (when the students can not attend school because of snow), they have classroom wikis and a school wiki. Each wiki allows the students different rights but all link together so the students really don't know (or need to know) which wiki they are on.

That way as a teacher you may have a wiki you have spent a lot of time on and do not want the children to change so it can only be edited by you, and other wikis where the students can make changes and have ownership of what is going onto the wiki. Lee Stream have a protected wiki which can not be seen by anyone without a password or searched for on google, which respects the wishes of their community.

Bilinda wanted fancy buttons which matched in her navigation bar, you click on the small link under the side navigation bar that reads "edit navigation" to do this.
She made some cool little buttons on a website called cool text , once you have rendered the button and downloaded it and saved it as a file on your computer, you can upload the button as a picture to your wiki and insert it. Then you link the picture to the page you want and you have a cool looking navigation button.

I have mentioned it before on my blog but will say it again because doing this straight away saves time later. When you first start your wiki get rid of the white box which is in the navigation bar because it automatically makes every page a link in the menu, which is a pain later when you want to have more pages.

Bilinda is a really fast learner, she has a lot of past experience and techie skills which helps but one of her learning behaviours is to tell the person she is working with how she likes to learn and how she is feeling about what she is learning. It makes it easy to explain things to her because she can express when she still needs time to process something, or needs a drawing, or to practice something again. I don't know if you do that on purpose Bilinda or were just thinking out loud but it is a fantastic behaviour to have.

One of best things that came out of the reflection lessons I did with my class for the wiki was not something I had planned for, the children started giving me feedback about their learning preferences (which sometimes was a pain- just joking but you know how it is). It was really wonderful that they had realised through the wiki that this information was important and helpful to me as their teacher. How great would it be if children did actually say "I need some processing time now"or " Can we get a video of it, that is how I learn the best". I learnt that that can happen if you teach them to, best of all after a while they started doing it for themselves.

Bilinda must be one of those people who don't need to be taught that or maybe she has taught herself to do that at some stage in her life. Not many children implicitly know or think about how they best learn. I think that is one of the most powerful questions we can ask them.

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