Monday, December 04, 2006

What Next?


I've been thinking a lot about you and your students, and wondering how the China unit is going. I've been keeping up a little bit through Brelle's blog. It seems like all is going well.

I told you all I would contact you today to ask for input on what would be helpful to you at this point. Since we aren't going to be able to meet today, and your China unit will be completed by the January meeting that we've set, what would you suggest? Would you like to meet as a group or would you prefer to meet individually, or maybe a combo? Originally, I was supposed to work with "the group" for four one-hour sessions, but we have some wiggle room, so don't worry about going over our allotted time. Instead of responding via email, why don't you all post your ideas and thoughts as a comment to this posting.

I do have one piece of technology to suggest that would lend itself to collaborating and sharing resources for this China unit -- a Wiki. Here's a quick definition from Wikipedia:
A wiki is a type of Web site that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring.
If you get a moment, check out these links for examples of how teachers are using wikis:

http://webloggedlinks.pbwiki.com/Wikis
http://wiki.woodward.edu/hannalee/doku.php?id=hannalee
http://flatclassroomproject.wikispaces.com/home

If you do decide (either individually, or as a group) that you would like to explore creating a wiki, I just found out that Wikispaces is giving away "free K-12 Plus wikis. That includes all the features and benefits that normally cost $50/year - for free. No fine print, no usage limits, no advertising, no catches."

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

3 comments:

Elaine said...

Belated greetings to you! As you probably have surmised, school life is fairly hectic right now. It's taken me a week to get the time to read your post! Yikes!!! This afternoon our team will have a little bit of time to talk about technology and China after school. I know we've thought about having a technology piece to share with the Lower School community about our experiences with our unit on China. It may end up being something low tech like an i-photo slide show. I'll let you know what we decide as soon as we decide!

Elaine said...

I wanted to follow up after my previous comment. The K team did decide to go with an i-photo slide show to share with the Lower School at our assembly in January. It will highlight a variety of hands-on experiences the children have had during this unit.

Susannah said...

Dear Elaine,

Thank you for your comments on the blog. I have been inundated with end-of-year things to take care of.

I think the slide show idea is a good one. I would also love to at least show you all what a wiki is and what it could do for you as a team. Do we need to schedule an earlier meeting in January? Let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Susannah