Week 5: Wiki Assigment in the Classroom

Kindergarten Science Wiki Activity

Source: http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/learn.jsp

  This scholastic site is great.  You can view activities by Grade & Subject.  The wiki activity I chose is underneath and it is science related.  Please read below:

After selecting the science activity, I chose the online bug field trip below.  Online Bug Field Trip (2-3 Day Length of Activity).  As a group we would visit Internet Field Trips. My students will visit image sites in the field trip, such as the Entomology Image Gallery . We would point out names of bugs, their habits, and habitats.  We would go to the following website and each student would be give time to select a ‘bug’ (I would collect this data) and assist with posting them on our classroom wiki. The Skill Focus of the assignment are: Have students learned anything new about bugs? Can they describe characteristics that organize bugs into separate categories? Add students' responses to a classroom created K-W-L poster then post the results on our wiki!  http://www.ent.iastate.edu/ - Iowa State Entimology State will be our main ‘science’ site.

After seeing pictures of a bug, exploration field trip, I would organize to have students go out into the playground/field to ‘explore’ the surroundings and see if any bugs can be found.  This would be a class activity and we would organize a time when students can focus and there are not other students out.  We can also request the use of grade appropriate magnifying glasses from the science teacher.  I want to teach the student on appropriate use of science equipment and how we handle things with care.  We will then take pictures and post them to our classroom blog- along with the new and informative images we find on the Iowa State Entomology Site.  For such activities parents are always invited to edit our findings on our wiki and view our classroom blog and wiki for this exercise.  I will also ask students to explore their ‘home’ backyards or nearby parks and bring a picture of bugs they found and we can add further items to our wiki.  During reading time, I will add a book to our reading about bugs with a lot of illustrations and pictures. This project will take us about 2-3 days.

An interactive internet game for our wiki assignment.

One of the specimens on the Iowa State Site.

An Online Zoo Visit also from Iowa State.

Week 3: Lesson with Blogs in Classroom

Our elementary school was considered an “overflow” school for Pre-K through 5^th grade students in H.I.S.D (Houston Independent School District).  The school was very small with only 3 or 4 classrooms for each grade.  One of the issues we often faced was the limited interaction we had as a kindergarten classroom with other kindergarten classrooms across the school district.

What we have learned in our Web 2.0 classrooms are the ease and practical uses of blogs in an educational setting.  My idea for a lesson would be use blogs as a communication tool between my kindergarten classroom and others in the school district.  The objective would be to record ourselves as a classroom and report on the day’s activities complete with weather report, day of week, etc.  I would then upload our video to our classroom blog.  As a teacher, I would partner with another kindergarten teacher located the farthest away from our school at a different elementary school in the district.  We’d log on to their website to see their own weather report, and activities. 

I would have students answer questions after watching the other classroom’s blogs.  We could compare the difference in weather and activities.  From these types of observations several other extensions can be created such as graphing, compare/contrast tables.  We can draw the number of students in their classroom versus ours.  The idea is to have my students understand that we are communicating with a school that is geographically “far” away from our campus and not next door. 

I would also invite my students’ parents to post comments or ideas, and suggestions to the blog.  I would want parents to be open to using technology and not be ‘weary’ of having students being on video.  I think that it would also be important to change this assignment and properly coordinate with the other teachers in the district to make certain it becomes a success.  I think if students get the suppport in the classroom and at home, it would build for great future lessons that would integrate technology.