Friday, March 14, 2008

Wiki DRP

Wiki DRP 
(Disaster Recovery Plan)

This is the wiki for the subject Materials Design at CAECE University created in 2007. Ana María is using the wiki again this year, but with a few changes. With surprise, I read the email notification of the latest changes. All the profile pages of the students of last year have been deleted. Those pages were full of trials and encouragement comments to those playing with the wiki tool for the first time. I understand my tutor deleted it because it definitely did not add value to the project. 

However, I must say I felt kind of sad to see my homepage deleted there. I remember a rich mini exchange with my teacher I wanted to save. So I immediately proceeded to the DRP action. I rescued the following from my RSS subscription.

Claudia Ceraso - Student Profile

After a year of using online tools to enhance my teaching, I admit I do not need much talking into it. I probably cannot go back to considering the web a place to read only. It is a read/write web -just like this wiki- where every page you see is liable to change.

My attitude in front of a screen has changed. I figure our students will face a future of information and communications change for which we cannot fully prepare them. Yet, we can give them tools and a glimpse of the digital literacies they will need for lifelong learning.

Technology Integration
Ana María asks 'Are these tools useful?'. I venture to say they can, as long as they are used with a clear direction. A learning objective. A teacher's need to fully control the outcomes of the activities misses the point. Teachers must be willing to learn together with their students.
My FCE class is the population of students in need of tailor made materials. Course books do not cater for the blend of needs of these students.

 So needs were partly addressed.
This
 last summer I designed a wiki to create a portfolio for all our written production. It is meant to organise homework and it will be also used in class. The activities I design in this course will be used there.
I must say I felt so glad last January when I found Ana María had joined B4B workshop because by then, my steps towards integrating these tools to my teaching had started triggering off potential research questions.
I expect this Materials Design II course to help

...................
But this is a profile page; not an essay!
Links
I will be including here some links to my work:
The blog I created for my students:
http://fceblog.blogspot.com

The students' Corpus wiki
http://www.corpus.wikispaces.com
ELT Notes 
http://eltnotes.blogspot.com
and my teacher's blog, where I keep my reflections, useful links, etc. Sometimes, people comment!


April 4 2007

Ana María Rozzi de Bergel commented on Claudia Ceraso - Student Profile

Dear Claudia, 

I hope we can all learn together to find the correct use for these technological tools. We must start off by analysing our students' needs. It is not a question of enjoying "the new toys".

April 14 2007

Claudia Ceraso commented on Claudia Ceraso - Student Profile

Ana María, 
I wonder whether the expression "correct use" will apply to tools that came into existence to cater for needs that were not educational. That's a challenge for us. 
If we can find together at least one instance of appropriate use of these tools to meet our EFL students needs, we will certainly have achieved a lot in a semester. 

Look forward to it.

April 15 2007

Pablo Cinalli commented on Claudia Ceraso - Student Profile

Hello, Clau!! Well I think I have made something wrong because I have my page but I cannot edit, I will go on searching and trying with blogs.........Your comments are always interesting!! No doubts...We go on in contact. 

April 17 2007

Angie commented on Claudia Ceraso - Student Profile

Dear people, I'm really amazed! I am not good at this type of technological tools, but I promise to do my best to keep up pace with you and enjoy this motivating challenge of learning.

April 18 2007

Ana María Rozzi de Bergel commented on Claudia Ceraso - Student Profile

No matter how technologically advanced these tools are, the important thing is that we use them a)if necessary; b) coherently.

April 21 2007

ivana commented on Claudia Ceraso - Student Profile

I would like to use this new technological tool with my students!



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Monday, April 02, 2007

ESL/EFL Wikis

ELT Teachers Using Wikis
(a mini directory)

As part of my summer learning in Jan and Feb, I joined an EVO Online workshop B4B (Blogging for Beginners). I joined quite late because I was busy designing my wiki for students. Among the participants, I found a few 'false begginers' in blogging who caught my attention for a number of coincidences:


Coincidences
  1. We have all set up our firsts blogs roughly around the same time (March 2006)
  2. We were thinking and designing our first wiki projects in January 2007
  3. We have chosen the same tools -Blogger and Wikispaces
  4. We all use del.icio.us- pab, monicabh, jenverschoor, fceblog (only Mary, kushikatsu , uses the network)

Interesting, I thought. Similar experiences, objectives and potential seamless integration of the tools we are using. Lots of collaboration/network possibilities here.

I left comments in their blogs (here and here) and emailed them separately. Only to find even more coincidences:
-Jennifer and Mônica also teach Cambridge FCE courses.
-Mônica is also studying at university and intends to use the wiki project as part of her research.

Can it get any better? We'll see.

I think you've met but...
Now it's time to get to know each other better. Here is a detail of our online work:

Mary Hillis
Blog: One Teacher's Journey
Wiki: ESL for Migrants

Paul, Pab
Blogs:
Pab's Potpourri (for teachers)
The Writing Studio (for students)
LTD Project Blog
(for teachers)
Wiki: The LTD Project
(I'm a member of this wiki)

Mônica Veado
Blog:Movie Reviews (for students)
Wiki:Movie Reviews

Jennifer Verschoor
Blogs:
My Integrating Technology Journey (for teachers)
Open Classroom (for students)
Wiki: Open Classroom

And mine
Blog: The FCE Blog (for students)
Wiki: Corpus

I will be watching how these projects evolve. I hope you also post about them. Lot's to learn from each other, don't you think?

Apart from my posts here, I will also post brief updates from my Corpus wiki (see About this project).
I'll call it PLOG, i.e. production blog.


My questions to teachers with wikified classrooms
-How are your projects getting on? What are the difficulties you are encountering? Have your students welcomed new ways of learning?

Stay in touch.
(If you write about this in your blog, please link to this post's permalink so I'll find you.)
...............................

While we wait for comments, here's a reading list:

Links to other EFL wiki projects

For teachers
Dude has a wiki about Web 2.0 tools and innovative lesson plans and ideas,
EFL and Web 2.0

EFL Geek has an ESL & EFL wiki with forums.

And Graham has more than one, I am a member of this one:
Pod-EFL all about Podcasting ideas.
Evogaming

And the Webheads love wikis too, of course!
BaW07
Open Webpublishing
Barbara Diew's authors and participates in many wikis
Not so new and with an intriguing title, Writing Matrix, makes me wonder why sometimes collaborative wiki projects do not take off.

For students
Nancy, from Canada, has a well organised wikidot. She is concise and clear. Love her style.

Illya, who teaches CAE, has a wiki to organise vocabulary.
CAE Words

From Argentina, Rita Zeinstejer -the pioneer- worked with CAE in wikispaces last year. Her students took part in the IWE wiki. I saw a wiki of hers with students describing their city. Beautiful.
(Unfortunately I lost the link. Can you add it here Rita? Your work is a seed for mine)
...............

More in my del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us/fceblog/wiki

If you are not in my del.icio.us already, would you like to let us know about your wikis?


Attribution: Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net


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Wednesday, February 21, 2007

On the Wiki Threshold

My Corpus wiki is ripe. It took me about a month to think over what this wiki will be about. Now it is ready to launch. Lessons begin next March. I believe I have produced an overall site design that includes key sections for the learning purpose, the users/readers involved, and sufficient room for change as we all learn with this wiki.

I think it will be a good idea to blog about this. Probably many of us teachers face the same steps and it can be revealing to read about the process. Not just see results and wonder how they made it.

Blogs and Wikis
There we find the first difference: Blogs are good platforms to record processes and stages. In wikis it is the last version that counts. Of course teachers will agree that the best section in a wiki is the Discussion where you can learn how a community interacted to get those results. But in a blog every step of the way, every journal entry is a final version on its own right.

My First Draft
The good think about having finished the first draft is that my mind is free to approach the next step. The how to wiki. This is where networking and connecting (probably in that order) will be crucial to make this experiment a successful project.

My Knowledge Base
I am familiar with blogging but this is my first wiki. Blogging has helped me build an information and people network I now resort to. All information is managed by tags in my del.icio.us account. My del.icio.us network is full of teachers and edubloggers far more experimented than I am. I have contacted by blog and mail people who are teachers of English at the same stage of development of their wikis.


The Shift from Teaching to Learning
Listening to Will Richardson answering questions after his presentation at the Connectivism conference, you notice in his tone of voice that he is not worried at all about having the answers. The point is not to know all the answers but to know how to get the answers. He says he has built a network where he will be able to ask and learn whenever he needs.

A New Frame of Mind
This is the question. Can we teach as we learn? Haven’t all of us sometimes come to the conclusion that all of the knowledge acquired (should I say studied?) at university only clicked in our heads when we started teaching?

Not all of us can feel comfortable learning as we go along. I cannot see a good reason why we all should, either. In the implementation of innovations, we are all to have different roles and positions towards them.

Should every teacher have a blog or a wiki for her class? To me this sounds as if we all had to consider becoming reporters in a newspaper because it is vital to stay informed. I need literacy to read and process the information. I do not need to learn how to design blogs or wiki projects. I need to know that when I am faced with a wiki or blog I can decide to take part in it or not. I need collaboration literacy. That is all.

If we can make our colleagues aware, that’s a promising start. I would not expect much more. Most blogs online today are not blogging at all and several wikis are a one man show. Even people with high internet skills very often miss the point.

The Innovator in Context: Wikis in Education
When we deal with disruptive technologies there will be different actors involved within and outside the school. Some questions:
-Can they all have a say in this?
-How?
-When will we listen?
-At what stage of the project shall we incorporate these voices?

Our decision making process has to evolve as much as our newly acquired web literacy. If we are pioneers in our school context or early adopters -to use Carl Rogers terminology- we will have to embrace the distributed nature of the internet and design ways in which decisions can be "distributed" as well. The school, the students, their parents will have a say about what we do online.

This learning process for the innovator in context does not sound as thrilling as learning how to use wikis, podcasts and blogs. It would be wonderful if they spoke the language we speak now. But this is what there is. Whether we like it or not.


Follow-up/resources links
(I’ll be using the umbrella tag ‘wiki’)
http://del.icio.us/fceblog/wiki

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