I Frame- Blogs in Wikis at St Leonard's School

At St Leonards two of the classes have been using wikis in 2009. Both had decided over time that they would like a place to put news or share work. As time went on they wanted to archive this work and things had started to get messy. Their wikis were not originally intended to have this information on them but as their skills have grown they now wanted to use them in this way. A blog is really a better tool to use to update news and have it archived as the blog does this for you. So we made two blogs and went over how these worked which was easy for these teachers as they were able to relate the skills and understandings from their wiki to learn to blog. The parents are well trained to visit the wiki and they didn’t want to manage two online spaces. We could have linked the blog into the wiki with a button but we decided to use an Iframe. We used some html code to put a window in the wiki which you could see and interact with the blog through. Check them out, they look great. Room 1 and Room 3.

Lianne at St Leonards has been thinking about using her class wiki for news board, she will get students to write onto the wiki and at the top of the writing she will write DRAFT so parents know it has not been checked by the teacher. Thanks to our National Facilitator Jill for this idea.

We talked about then using the children’s writing at newsboard to edit this work as a class, taking responsibility for the wiki’s presentation as a class. This would mean Lianne doesn’t have to do this after school in her preparation time and the students benefit from an authentic editing experience as newsboard time.