Workshop+Day+Four

media type="custom" key="23585516" Web 2.0 Tools for Social Studies, Day 4: Wikis and Other Tools

Objectives:
 * Participants will be able to create and contribute to a wiki and identify several ways that one might be used.
 * Participants will explore several Web 2.0 tools and evaluate them for use in the classroom or professional practice.

A wiki is a web document that allows users to add or edit content, effectively creating the whole site as a group. Users can edit one another’s work, and previous versions of entries can be viewed or reverted to. Most of us are familiar with Wikipedia, the enormous crowd-sourced encyclopedia that has become one of the internet’s standard resources. Do you trust Wikipedia as a reference? We will discuss how we use it and why and use that discussion to construct some guidelines for creating our own wikis.

To create our own wikis:
 * 1) Navigate to www.wikispaces.com
 * 2) Under “Join Now,” click “I’m a Teacher.”
 * 3) Give your new wiki a name. This wiki will be for the classroom, so name accordingly.
 * 4) Identify your school
 * 5) Once you have created your wiki, go to “Members” and invite “MisterHobbs” (that’s me) to join your wiki.
 * 6) Click on “Pages” on the right to get to a home page. Select edit to write a quick introduction.
 * 7) While still editing go to “widgets” and add “RSS feed.” Enter the URL of your blog for students.
 * 8) Save the page and you will see that posts to your blog appear on your wiki.
 * 9) Take a look at some of the other useful widgets. You’ll notice tools to create discussion areas, polls, calendars, and more.

Pages on wikispaces are easy and quick to create, edit, and link together. We will discuss ways to use wikis for the classroom and professional practice that will include:
 * Building a reference site throughout the school year that acts as a repository for student research and writing.
 * Developing electronic portfolios.
 * Collaborative creation of policy documents for the school.

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The internet has countless applications of value to teachers. We will look at a few that other teachers are having success with.
 * Evernote ( [|www.evernote.com] ) : Available for multiple platforms, Evernote allows teachers and students to collect and organize web pages, notes, pictures, audio, PDF files . . . Useful for any project that requires accumulating and arranging resources. Notes can be sent directly Evernote to social sites or email.
 * Issuu ( [|Issuu.com] ) allows users to upload documents which are published like magazines. The documents can be embedded from Issuu into blog posts or wiki pages. Any kind of document, student or professional that might be published as a magazine can be uploaded to Issuu: newsletters, comic books, writing or art journals, etc.
 * Timetoast ( [|www.timetoast.com] ) provides a sophisticated tool for creating timelines that include text, pictures, and links. Timelines are a popular group project and Timetoast produces good-looking, shareable results.

What other internet tools do you use for interaction and collaboration?

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