Wiki Mania

I worked with seven teachers at Outram who are all taking on a wikispace to manage and enhance effective computer use during Maths or Reading time. Janfrie, Kerry, Megan and Lynda have the best advantage for their action research, that they will all be able to support one another and save each other a lot of work. One of the most time consuming things about making a wiki can be finding the approriate games and sites to link to. This searching and reviewing should be made easier as it can be done as a team.

One of the best things about wikis is that you can copy pages etc of other people's wikis and if you work in a syndicate situation where everyone has a wiki you can take turns making some of the pages your class works from, modifying pages is much easier than building them from scratch.

We discussed some of the management ideas and the wiki has some ideas to support thismanaging ICT in the class . Janfrie was concerned that the children would not play the computer games correctly and made a good point about learning opportunities being lost because of too much choice. We talked about what she does with floor games in her class currently. She gives children a specific game she wants them to play which relates to what they are learning and she teaches the children to play this game before she sends them off to play it. The computer should be no different.

Greg was in the room at the time and suggested numbering the games, most teachers will be doing this so they are able to tell the children "circles will be playing number 12 today."They can match the right game to the child and learning intention without any extra preparation. Once the games are there and all numbered, all of the work is done. That is even easier than floor games- you won't be trying to put all the game pieces back in the right bags during the holidays.

We all looked for games to link to from the following sites. I will start compiling a list on the wiki in the future as the year goes on and hopefully all of the finds of these fantastic five will be added in there and we can all benefit from their searching.

Literacy
Big Universe
Starfall

Numeracy
NZMaths We also looked at the digital objects.
BBC Maths this is a link to the main BBC schools site which has Math, Science and English stuff which is really fantastic. Go to the Primary part. KS1 is juniors KS2 Year 3ish-5/6 KS3 will have some stuff which is appropriate at Year 6-8.

KS means Key Stage ( a bit like our curriculum levels in NZ)


One of the best things to know when building a wiki especially for little ones is how to take a screen shot. To take a screen shot it is the command key, shift key and the number 4 key together on a Mac on a PC you need a programme. It is also important to use tabbed browsing (having a few tabs open at once) you press cntrl (PC) or command (Mac) and the letter T, to open a new tab. Then you can have you wiki open in one tab and use other tabs for searching in.


I can't wait to see how all of these teachers work together and what they all do in their classrooms.