I've been spending some time searching for wikis about teenagers' reading comprehension and strategies to increase comprehension. I haven't found anything really great yet. I'm hoping to find a spot where teachers from all over discuss problems that they've encountered and what has worked for them.
Until then...the most interesting and relevant wiki I came across had to do with teaching social studies. There was also a lot of information about how Social Studies will soon have Common Core Standards, the way English and math now do in Wisconsin (and a myriad of other states).
The Core Standards put a lot of emphasis on literacy being taught in the content area classrooms. This is really important to me. As someone who teachers language arts and history, I've always believed that it's not "just" the English teacher's responsibility to make sure kids can read. Furthermore, my capstone project has to do with non-fiction reading strategies in the content area classroom. So, this wiki (which can be found at: http://mcdsocst.wikispaces.com/) caught my attention.
I can't tell right now if a lot of other people are contributing or if it's just the author mainly. Although it's set up as a wiki, if no one joins, is it really a wiki? Or just a fancier blog?
I'm not all that excited about wikis. I know what you mean about not being able to tell exactly who is editing/updating the wiki. When my students are doing research, I alwasy tell them to make sure they are getting information from reliable sources. The problem is when you don't really know who the source is, then it is difficulte to trust it. Kids don't always have the best skills in evaluating sources. I think that we as teachers need to address this when we discuss wikis with our students.
ReplyDeleteI think that is a good point about a wiki ending up like one person's blog. It appears to me, there needs to be a group invested in developing the wiki. Wikipedia seems to attract a range of contributors, but in light of how many people actually read Wikipedia, the contributors is really a small number and most focus on a very small subject area (perhaps one entry). I've heard of schools who have developed an entry for Wikipedia on a topic of local interest. It might be interesting to create a wiki around the state that has elementary schools all creating entries on their local communities. It might be an interesting way to lead into the discussion of authority in Wikipedia. It's also a chance to talk about how to look at the same topic in multiple sources to double check the information. Evaluation of information when you don't know anything about a topic is challenging, even for adults.
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