Wikis out there for Social Studies

I did look up Wikis specifically for the deaf, but I really only found a couple designed to help people understand deaf culture. I loved them, and maybe could use them in my classroom to help students new to the school or late deafened and therefore new to Deaf culture. They could also be helpful for parents trying to help their newly diagnosed child integrate into Deaf culture. But while these are useful, they are not exactly what I was looking for.

I was really looking for were Wikis about social studies content. I was so glad to find so many. With deaf students, it is better to have more visual information than less, and to be honest the more captioned videos something has the more my students are engaged. I found that the following things were most important to a good WebQuests for deaf student:

1. Working links
2. Pictures (preferably original ones) that are labeled
3. Not a lot of weird moving grahics that distract from the text
4. Directions that are clearly labeled as directions and are very concise
5. Videos with closed captioning or English subtitles

I looked at the following wiki: http://constitutionresources.pbworks.com/w/page/16391949/FrontPage about the US constitution. It was helpful, and all the data was recent (history only changes so much). It's really more of a teacher resource, with more lesson plans than just activities. I saw no student work, it seemed to only be for teachers. However, it was super useful.

Inquiry Based Project

 Actually creating an inquiry-based activity was quite valuable for me. Honestly, I thought I would be able to quickly throw this together. I found instead that answers to questions were decentralized and I had a difficult time finding them from reliable sources. I found myself frustrated, and I can only imagine the frustration my students would have felt.

I had just kind of come up with questions, questions I know the answer to because I'm a college senior, but then when I had to actually FIND these answers, I ended up revising questions because they were way too difficult to find outside a text book. This is actually something I view as a weakness of Web-based activities: textbooks are boring, but they offer a lot of information in a small space. This is something the web rarely offers, because information on the web for an 8th grade audience is decentralized, while textbook grade information is outside the ZPD of most middle schoolers. And so teacher have to balance it all out all of the time.

But it does give me a good lesson in creating activities: I should always do the activity first and be able to do it well. To skip this step puts into jepoardy my entire activity.

Webquests

I had always thought WebQuests were a bit too time consuming for use in a real classroom, but I am pretty sure I only thought that because the WebQuests I did in high school were awful. There was no teamwork and the teachers always allotted way too much time for them. Usually the activity would take me ten minutes then I would have to sit there for another 40 minutes waiting for class to be over. 

However, the WebQuests we looked at in class were really neat! Especially in the context of history, the internet has so much potential to show primary sources, video, and pictures I can't give them with just a book. And I love the team collaboration involved with WebQuests. 

Website Evaluation

I found assessing a website an interesting activity. I especially found the sections on which types of software or plugins important; I had not previously thought about checking for those types of things. In middle school, I actually had to do a similar activity, and I learned a couple of good lessons from doing the same activity something like ten years apart.

The first lesson was the difference in the types of activities and instruction needed at the middle school and college level. In middle school, the teacher allowed us to review any website we wanted and it totally overwhelmed me. I remember thinking about how the web was far too large to just ask me to review ANY site. How could any person every pick! And at that point my house still had cable internet, so the whole thing took forever. I do not remember the website I picked, but the whole thing made me feel panicky. Now, you ask me to review any website and I am comfortable enough on the web to find and pick one. I would imagine most of my students are much more comfortable on the internet than I was at that point, with social networking being such an important part of their lives. However, I would still refrain from just setting them loose on the web. It is fine for college kids, but middle grades children need a bit more structure, I think. Perhaps I could ask them (if I ever needed to assign this) to review a website about spies during the Cold War or something of that nature.

I was also by just how different the web is now than ten year ago. I've been present for its evolution, but stopping and thinking about it really took me aback. For example, we did not review plugins because at that point java was really the only embedded plugin. The only navigation we cared about was being able to return to the home page, as many websites did not have side bar or top navigation. It was really more like a word file than a webpage by today's standards. Technology is really quite remarkable.

Wikis

I found the article about Wikis interesting and brief. In my opinion, this is the college kid's ideal article type. I also enjoy the use of KWLS charts, as they seem to be an effective way to elicit feedback in my students. I have since employed KWLS charts in several of the classes I work with, and the kids seem to like it. I tend to let them free-form their answers, though. If they respond better in drawing than in writing, I allow it.

The most interesting part of the article was, I thought, the discussion of the genesis of wikis as a way for scientists to share new information quickly.I had no idea! This is the same reason we use our resource wikis. However, I really do not like the resource wikis. I find them difficult to navigate at best and frustrating at worst. I have never liked group projects, especially when communication beteween us is so difficult and it seems we have so different rules placed on us.

In terms of how I might go about using wikis in the classroom, I think it would be a neat way for the students to create a class-wide timeline of events for American history. This would work really well using the JIGSAW method. For example, every student could take and few years and research them, then add their information to the wiki. It would also work well in geography class or world civilizations, and my class could create a wiki for each country or region we study. Finally, it might be a good way to study original documents, with students constantly asking and answering each other's questions.