Create/Maintain Personal Wiki to Implement Instruction

This activity had the most impact on my communication with students and other stakeholders and saved me hours of time, so I categorize it under Technology Facilitation Standard V: "Educational technology facilitators apply technology to enhance and improve personal productivity and professional practice" (Williamson & Redish, 2009, p. 207).

When we first learned about wikis in EDLD5306: Fundamentals of Educational Technology, we focused on their collaborative nature and their relationship to the concept of Web 2.0 (Mills, 2007). I appreciated that and went on to use wikis to plan with teachers and my students, but I also saw that a wiki created a simple platform to host a Web 1.0 site. I had never used Web site software that so simply let you create and link to pages. All teachers were using SchoolCenter to host classroom Web sites, but it was so tedious and difficult to use that frequent updates were unrealistic. I linked my SchoolCenter site to my new site on Wikispaces, and used it to house everything that we were doing in class.

In the past, I had used PowerPoints to create content to display on my classroom projector. It was useful, but only I had access to the files and it was not easy to find specific content. With my classroom wiki, anyone with a Web connection could access exactly what we were doing in class every day. This was especially helpful when I had a substitute, because all I had to do was designate a student to log in to the projector computer and go to the site with all information. In the past, since I did not have a simple way to share a PowerPoint file with substitutes, I reverted to overheads when I had a sub.

This saved time, but the biggest time saver was through parent/student communication. Since wikis let you attach files to individual pages, I included all handouts and notes from class each day. Students could see exactly what we were doing in class while they were out sick in the same format they would have seen in class. Since I linked individual assignments in the online grade book to the corresponding page on my wiki, parents could immediately see exactly what their students made a bad grade on. It saved us all a lot of phone tag and time on the phone, and it gave parents a starting point for a conversation with their students about grades. It also covered me, because each wiki entry has a date stamp. I never had this conversation last year: "My son said he did not know about..."

My classroom site also helped me reach students with disabilities more easily. A hearing-impaired student sat in front of her own computer, so she could use text to speech to read assignments. Students who have trouble staying on task also benefited from having access to step-by-step instructions on their own desk. My wiki was Universally Designed for Learning (UDL) (CAST, 2010).

ISTE Standards/Indicators (Williamson & Redish, 2009)

• • (TF-II.A) Design developmentally appropriate learning opportunities that apply technology enhances instructional strategies to support diverse needs of learners.

  • (TF-II.C) Identify and locate technology resources and evaluate them for accuracy and suitability.

  • (TF-III.A) Facilitate technology-enhanced experiences that address content standards and student technology standards.

  • (TF-III.B) Use technology to support learner-centered strategies that address the diverse needs of students.

  • (TF-III.B.1) Use methods and strategies for integrating technology resources that support the needs of diverse learners, including adaptive and assistive technology.

  • (TF-III.D) Manage student learning activities in a technology-enhanced environment.

  • (TF-V.C) Apply technology to increase productivity.

  • (TF-V.D) Use technology to communicate and collaborate with peers, parents, and the larger community in order to nurture student learning.

  • (TF-VI.B) Apply technology resources to enable and empower learners with diverse backgrounds, characteristics, and abilities.

  • (TF-VI.E) Facilitate equitable access to technology resources for all students.

  • (TF-VII.A) Use the school technology facilities and resources to implement classroom instruction.

  • (TF-VIII.A) Identify and apply educational and technology related research, the psychology of learning, and instructional design principles in guiding the use of computers and technology in education.

  • (TF-VIII.E) Engage in supervised field-based experiences with accomplished technology facilitators and/or directors.

References

Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) (2010). About UDL. Retrieved from http://cast.org/udl/index.html

Mills, L.B. (2007). The next wave now: Web 2.0. The Education Digest, 73(4), 4-5. Retrieved from http://www.academicpartnership.com/lamar/library/LibraryAccess.htm

Williamson, J. & Redish, T. (2009). ISTE's technology facilitation and leadership standards: What every k-12 leader should know and be able to do. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.