Wikis!

I have done a lot of experimenting with Wikis today. On www.wikipedia.org, I tried to look up the article on my school. My school did not already have its own article. Before creating one, I first did some editing to the article on my school district in which I added a few facts about my building. I also broke up the current article into two smaller articles to help with readability. I then created a short article on my school, Pearson Education Center. I did not make my article very long, as I would like to see if anyone adds anything to the article. I think it would be interesting to see if anyone does, since my building is often the forgotten step-child of the district. Above you will see screen shots of these.

Finally, after editing on Wikipedia, I created my own wiki on wikispaces.com. The address is http://msmacswiki.wikispaces.com/. I have set it up to keep track of Web 2.0 resources and add to them. I also included two pages for my U.S. History class. One page simply lists websites that will be useful to my students. The second page is one I titled “History Is” in which I am going to ask my students to come up with their own explanations of what they think history is. I plan to use this as brainstorming for an essay I will ask them to write later this year. I look forward to seeing how creative my students can be.