Annotated+Wikispaces+Resource

Annotated Wikispaces lesson resources.

Wikispaces is a public information sharing website. Wikis were pioneered by Ward Cunningham, and a Wiki is a website the makes it easy for people to contribute pages, change pages, and link them together. Wikis are social software that makes communication online simple, and is a useful online collaboration tool.

The popularity in Wikis has increased at the same time as schools are looking towards Information Communication Technologies to use as a teaching tool. While the increasing popularity in Wikis and the move towards ICT’s are not directly related it does show that schools are updating best teaching practice to stay current with the growth in online communication.

Some of the basic functions that make using Wikis useful in the primary classroom are:
 * They are easy to learn to use.
 * All information on Wikis is easily found, data does not get lost on emails, hard drives and intranets. Once a student logs in all their Wikis are easily available.
 * Wikis are available anywhere as they are online and not confined to intranets, thus allowing students to monitor and update with new information their Wikis at anytime
 * Wikis are very flexible; Students can customise their pages in any way they wish.
 * Wikis have a very low cost, many Wiki sites offer free trial periods or are free entirely.

The relevance of Wikispaces to the unit of work on Celebrations is that Wikispaces provides students with a common database for them to upload and share their multimodal text. Students will be able to upload their individual pages on a class Wiki and present their work on celebrations as a multimodal text. Students will upload their information report and images found on the internet on their Wiki page, students may also wish to explore further aspects of multimodality through videos and audio recordings if time permits in the last lesson in the unit of work or in their own time. Wikis are a work sample that students can show their parents or caregiver outside of school hours, Wikis can be useful for parent teacher interviews and information nights to show the quality of students work.

For the unit of work on celebrations the class Wiki will be used as a summative assessment task.

Once the class Wiki on celebrations has been completed in can be viewed by teachers and students on Interactive White Boards. If the students are comfortable with the process Wikis can be used as a way of communication between student, teacher, community and family for any purpose required.

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