Vodcast on my ESETT Wiki
Here’s my vodcast about my Wetpaint wiki for my ESETT Professional Development.
Link to the wiki site: http://esettsummer2008.wetpaint.com/
You are looking at posts that were written in the month of August in the year 2008.
Here’s my vodcast about my Wetpaint wiki for my ESETT Professional Development.
Link to the wiki site: http://esettsummer2008.wetpaint.com/
Several things will let us know that the wiki is successful:
1. If teachers not only create their teacher page, but nominate teachers for various awards that we will be given for achievement from the last year. That will show that not only were teachers willing to share what they have done, but also that other teachers viewed the hard work that they put into creating the page in order to nominate them.
2. If teachers are contributing to the post-breakout session brainstorming. After each breakout session, teachers will work together to brainstorm how the content of the session could be useful in finding a use of technology that will help students interact with content at a higher level. They will do this either through contributing to forum discussions that are set up on that page of the wiki, or they will be working together to add content to a wiki page where they will share ideas.
3. If teachers are making use of the general space for posting questions, sharing ideas, etc. Often individual teachers will show us something cool that they are doing or thinking of doing, and we are the only audience for that idea. Now when they share an idea with us, we can encourage them to contribute to the wiki page to share their idea with others.
I will definitely be using a wiki provider. I had planned to use pbwiki because of the comments option that would allow teachers to contribute to a wiki page simultaneously, but after checking out Wetpaint, I switched to that option. In Wetpaint, you can do more than simply leave a comment on a page. You can also create a discussion related to the content of the page. I also was attracted by the very useful templates for creating a site and the more familiar structure of the page and associated tools. The wiki is going to be especially useful for laying out the plan for our professional development and being a place of sharing becuase it is flexible and can easily be changed on the fly. An important facet of our grant and training is that we don’t want to dictate the direction of training. Instead we want teachers to let us know what would be most useful to them and provide professional development in that area. So the wiki will be a great way to have a flexible environment for the schedule, resources, discussion, and sharing.
I will need to create the skeleton structure for the wiki. That means laying out the schedule, setting up the pages that will be used, etc. Then the presenters for each break out session will fine tune the pages for each session and teachers will fill out their pages. Several plugins will be very important. The first is the plugin that allows for the Google Presentation that will be used on the first day to be embedded within the page of the wiki related to the opening remarks. Another plugin that I will use is a polling plugin that will allow the presenters to get data on what teachers would like to see in break out sessions.
Yes and no. I like the overall look. I think it will be easy to navigate and easy to use for teachers. I also think that seeing a wiki used in professional development may spark ideas for teachers on how they could be used in the classroom (especially since they will be getting hands-on experience with it – not just viewing it). Where I am disappointed is in the deficiencies of Wetpaint. I would have liked to be able to edit in HTML mode to fine tune some things, but that feature isn’t available. Also, I couldn’t figure out how to customize the navigation across the top or on the sidebar. It looks like you have to take those as is. That was disappointing. I hope that may become an improvement in the future with Wetpaint.
Here’s a podcast about old songs that my grandma used to sing to me that she is now singing to my son.
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