Holidays are the best days..

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!


I hope you all are enjoying your days off. I don't know about you but I am having mixed feelings about the end of this semester. I am looking forward to my next placement class yet I am getting really sad about the fact that next week is our next week in our classrooms.

So for this Thanksgiving, I will be relishing in the time off; yet still be thinking about how I cannot believe we are basically half way through.

Enjoy the "break." I put "break" in quotes because I know we have a ton of work to do--so keep it up!

Wiki's and Education

I think using Wiki's in the classroom is a great idea! I find it to be just as beneficial as using blogs in the classroom. If teachers and parents are worried about the "public" characteristic of Wiki's--that can easily be fixed by making your Wiki private. Some great things I liked about Wiki's and the classroom are as follows:

• It teaches children how easy it is to create Websites--and gets them comfortable with technology; which is very important in our technology driven culture.
  
• It incorporates and encourages project development with peer review. If everyone has written a paper and reread it so many times that they couldn't see a glaring error right in front of their face and your friend points it right out. Multiply that by a million, and you get a big improvement.
• It also encourages group authoring. The whole class can work on a project together without getting confused with who made the latest change.
• Finally, and one that I find most important, Wiki's in the classroom encourage collaborative teaching. Students will have to learn to work together and to create posts that are compatible with one another.
  

I have found a video that provides some great and helpful ways to use Wiki's in the classroom. It is a video that is talking about High School students--however the practices can be adapted for Elementary students as well.