Wikispaces

Hi Alison,

I checked out wikispaces and created a wiki on this site. I have made wikis before, just a couple really, and used zoho. I think zoho is easy to use and straightforward unfortunately they charge you to have more than two wikis...which I know I've already mentioned...but I still think that's dumb.

Anyway, wikispaces is pretty good. I tried another wiki site out called tiddlywiki.com and thought I would find my way around that but it was confusing and frustrating to use and I gave up. I don't have much technical patience. If I can't find my way around a site, whatever it may be, in no more than 20 minutes then I'm a gonner and on to the next available option. I worked on wikispaces yesterday for an hour and the site was really slow and then finally shut down on me. That wasn't too cool. Anyway I created something very simple about visual search engines and I'll include the address at the bottom of this post.

As far as using wikis in my classroom, I have several ideas that I would like to explore. The most prominent idea though is that of an ethics battle in science. EVERY year there is some ethical issue that comes up in the news that we talk about in class. The discussion could last forever if I let it but obviously can't. I could post the discussion on the wiki and encourage my students to use it (with a little point incentive of course...) and see how that conversation evolves. I would be very interested in the results of the activity and I think it would ge a good mind opener to my students.

Other ideas involve conversations about human use of the environment, a disease research project done in pairs where the information required is posted on a specific page of the wiki and then presented in class, and perhaps even using the wiki for casual and respectful conversation about a topic of interest that we cover in a day.

I have to say here that thinking this through and writing it up makes me so excited to get back to the classroom!

Anyway, here is the address for the wikispaces site:

http://visualsearchengines.wikispaces.com

I don't know if you remember or not, I just remembered in fact, that I do have a disease wiki on zoho that I kept and plan on using in the classroom as soon as I can. Here is the address for that if you are interested.

http://classroomdisease.zoho.wiki.com

One last thing, when it comes time for me to try out wikis in the classroom, I will likely pay for a zoho account because so far, zoho has been the most user friendly.