Reading Reflection Week 3

I have to admit, when I first read the assignment this week, I was intimidated. I have never used or even knew what a wiki was. After reading the articles and watching the videos, however, the task seemed to be a little less daunting. Once I started the process of actually setting up my wiki, I realized that it was actually very easy and quite user friendly.

Although I still feel a blog would be more useful for my students’ parents, I could definitely use a wiki to update parents on the latest happenings in the classroom. It would also be an easy place to post homework assignments and newsletters. With the use of links, I post my newsletter and the link to view it. I work at a private school and every week we send out a newsletter highlighting the lessons that week and any news from the classroom. This is usually sent out to my students’ parents via e-mail and sent as an attachment. Instead of doing all of that, I could make a shortcut by using a wiki page. My wiki page could be a “homepage”, if you will, for parents to see links to different items. There, they would see a link for my newsletter and simply check it out there. One downfall to this is that, unless parents check my wiki page daily (or weekly for that matter), most parents would not receive the newsletter. As a teacher, I have found that most parents are more willing to be involved as long as the information is right there in front of them.

As far as assignments for my students go, I am at a loss. I teach Kindergarten and I feel they would have a hard time navigating a wiki page. They could possibly use one if I used a series of images and symbols. Most of my students are just learning to read and due to the varying reading levels, I would have to gear it towards my lower leveled readers. If anyone has any suggestions, I would be more than happy to hear from you.

I guess one way in which I could have my students use a wiki page would be during literacy centers. One of the literacy centers is “computers”. I have a few literacy websites that I have the students visit, however, I am usually the one to find the webpage and set it up for them. By using a wiki page, I could have the series of websites listed. Instead of using words, I could use mostly images and symbols to help them navigate the website.

Overall, I felt the wiki page was very useful and user friendly. I would like to find out more about changing the themes and adding more of the applications to make it more visually appealing. I will be interested to see others’ wiki pages and how they set theirs up.