Today I launched the discoverittasman Wiki. Initially this will be used to share information about the IT Heroes in all our schools - those brave souls who dare to go where they have never been before!
By seeing both a BLOG and WIKI in action, and hopefully taking part, you will soon understand the difference between the two. In brief:
These are both internet-based but differ from other websites in that:
BLOGS (web-logs) are kept by one person, and others may add comments.
WIKIS are websites which can be authored collaboratively by many people. The most commonly known example of this is Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org/) - a free encyclopedia which anyone can edit. They currently have 1,163,999 articles, and 1,530,075 registered user accounts!
What a great way to communicate with other students in our cluster:
- What about a shared book review wiki? Do you have people who maybe aren't so keen on reading, but would rush to finish a book so they can put their book review on the internet?
- How about learning vocabulary - work with students from other schools to perfect those tricky definitions.
Yesterday we had a look at "Hot Potatoes" - a free, easy to use program which enables you to create interactive Web-based teaching exercises which can be delivered to any Internet-connected computer equipped with a browser. All you need to do is enter the data for your exercises (questions, answers, responses etc.), and press a button. The program will create the Web pages for you, and you can then save them to your server. You can get your own copy from: http://hotpot.uvic.ca/
As most of us only have one or two computers in our classrooms, why not try using these as extension exercises, or tests before students move up a level etc... Give it a go - and have fun!
There has been a lot of interest in our Word Processing workshops, and lots of 'Oh ... so that's how you do it!' Great to see so many there and a huge thanks to Don at Tasman School for hosting us today, and demonstrating his new SmartBoard.
If anyone has any ideas or special requests for things you would like to create in future workshops, please let me know. Also, if you didn't quite finish today's task, or would simply like to repeat it, please come along to Parklands next week where we will repeat today's session, with more of a focus on using Macs.
There has been a lot of interest from our teachers in blogging so ... what better way to learn about it than try it out for ourselves!
I will use this blog to keep a record of happenings in our cluster, and hope you will all have a go at adding a comment at some stage. This blog was created at www.blogger.com, is free (is there any other sort?!) and easy to use. Let me know if you get stuck.
