Thing 9 - Wiki

This Thing 9 has been a labor intensive and time consuming "thing" and I am not sure that this is the best platform for my classroom...yet. I was most impressed with the classroom possibilities present with the wiki but disappointed with the number of actual samples I could reference. This may be part of my problem... it is difficult to find wikis for the Spanish language classroom (which means that I don't know how to search the wikis well yet). The wiki resources that showed surprising promise for me immediately were directed toward the professional development of the teacher.

When I tried to search for Spanish language classroom wikis, I used a few education wiki sites but am most interested in returning to
http://educationalwikis.wikispaces.com/Examples+of+educational+wikis. This was one search tool that had world languages as a category but lacked examples. The site stated that they are working on this. I will follow-up.

As I worked through the overview information provided by the 23 Things, I found great ideas for using wikis in the Spanish language classroom. I am intrigued about the use of wikis to create the following:

• study guides summarizing the semester for exams
• study hall format for the Spanish classroom
• FAQ about the class/grammar/projects/etc
• vocabulary summaries
• story starters that students continue
• group story writing that uses new vocabulary
  
• peer editing that uses note tabs to make corrections and suggestions
• literary analysis for upper level literature units
  
• character resumes
• travel brochures
• art gallery of Hispanic artists that we focus on in level 3
• musical styles, instruments, songs and lyrics of Hispanic cultures and artists
• Hispanic recipes
• a day in the life of a teen from a Hispanic country
• and teacher resource center as we work through our new text series

Yet for all the ideas generated by the information about wikis, I found few strong examples of these in use in the classroom. I am curious but still looking. I am intrigued by the student ownership but the appearance of the wikis I have investigated are primarily text and could use more photo/video/audio support of the language. Some wikis are great language resources like http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Spanish/Contents which summarizes general Spanish language content. Although the information and resources are useful, I find the review pages in the back of the our student textbook and the online text support offer a more user friendly and visually appealing summary of grammar. I plan to keep an eye on the development of http://sraburden.wikispaces.com/. She has a blog and wiki directed toward 8th graders. I am returning to the instruction of Spanish I next year and may find some inspiration from this site.

As my learning stands at this moment, I see the most immediate use of the wikis as a joint effort for the teachers in my district who are using our brand new textbook next year. We have three high schools in my district which means that many Spanish I teachers will be working through the adoption of the Spanish I textbook next year. Instead of progressing through this learning curve in isolation of the other high schools, the wiki seems like a great way to blend best practices and help each other avoid pitfalls. Ideally I would like to create a dumping ground to foster communication, create a unified approach to instruction and assessment, and share our "lessons learned" together. As an element of professional development on this teacher textbook wiki I would like to add a link to http://technospan.wikispaces.com/. This was my favorite wiki of all of the ones that I investigated. It is a summary of technology resources for the Spanish language teacher. The organization was very clear and user friendly, the content was useful, the site was very direct. I am anxious to explore this more. All in all, the wiki seems like a good idea but I am still trying to imagine where I want to end up with this technology tool.