thinking 2.0 » Wikis

Shakespeare – with a twist

msbarnsley — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:26:00 +0000

Clay Burrell has an energy for teaching that is infectious – better still he’s full of good ideas.

His new Wordpress powered blog has a growing number of teaching resources that use read/write web technologies and collaborative learning strategies in engaging and purposeful ways. Among them is a link to his AP Literature class project, King Lear Street Talk, in which students publish their version of Shakespeare remixed for a modern audience. He describes the project as: “We’re still trying to do something interesting by translating Shakespeare’s incredibly difficult but holy King Lear into contemporary English with a mafia twist … Think Shakespeare meets The Sopranos. It’s on a wiki, which we’ll hopefully then record as a serial radio drama podcast, and make into a graphic novel with ToonDo. Fingers crossed.”

Image: http://www.bigforksummerplayhouse.com/Complete%20Shakespeare%20abridged.jpg

Being the change you want to see

msbarnsley — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 11:27:48 +0000

In a previous post, Lighting Fires, Not Filling Buckets, I wrote about my Year 10 class which created some imaginative digital protest texts. The task was fairly open-ended and I was really pleased with the work these students produced. I have uploaded some of these to a protest wiki. If you get a chance, check it out.

xtimeline – could it make timelines interesting?

msbarnsley — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 09:28:10 +0000

History is one of my passions in life, but I’ve never found timelines very interesting activities. This could all change with xtimeline, which helps you create a timeline on any subject and multiple users can add information and still images to an ongoing project. You can set up privacy settings to moderate who can contribute, view or comment on a timeline. Below is a photo of a Vietnam War timeline found the site, but I’m more interested in getting students to create their own. We are about to start looking at Decolonisation on Indochina in Senior History so this could be another useful tool for students.

Another open source timeline application is available as part of the MIT SIMILE project, but it looks much, much harder; in fact, it looks too hard.

WikiMindMap

msbarnsley — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 08:51:07 +0000

WikiMindMap produces a mindmap view of Wikipedia content. According to the developers, it “is a tool to browse easily and efficiently in Wiki content, inspired by the mindmap technique. Wiki pages in large public wikis, such as wikipedia, have become rich and complex documents. Thus, it is not allways straight forward to find the information you are really looking for. This tool aims to support users to get a good structured and easy understandable overview of the topic you are looking for.”

This tool has the potential to help students overcome the “information overload” syndrome by presenting information in a mind map format, which could be great for visual learners. All you have to do is type in a key term, event etc. and the (online) program creates a dynamic mindmap with links to sections in wikipedia. I typed in World War I and the following mind map appeared. I don’t know if I’d use this initially with students as the process of creating a mind map helps them to make connections and develop causal reasoning skills about content they are studying, whereas WikiMindMap does all the work. It could be good for revision or to help navigate the massive amount of information on wikipedia.

The “Social Web”: Wikis, Blogs, flickr and more

msbarnsley — Tue, 08 May 2007 12:22:37 +0000

Blogging in the Classroom

msbarnsley — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 05:31:50 +0000

Welcome to the Teaching Tools blog.
This has information from the TAS PD day and is designed to help you set up blogs and wikis in your classroom.

What is a blog?

A blog is an online journal that can have one or multiple editors. It is a series of articles, most often in reverse chronological order. Students can have their own blog or comment on a class blog set up by a teacher. There are numerous web-based applications you can use to set up a blog. I recommend edublogs for free blogs that are designed for educators.

To set up a blog go to http://edublogs.org/
1. Go to teachers, librarians, educators and click start here

2. Add your username, email address, fill in the verification field and click Gimme a blog!

3. Name your blog domain – this will be the web address eg. tashistory

4. Put in the blog title (can be different to the domain). This is the title that will show up on the page (you can change this later)

5. Click Signup

6. You will have been sent an email, click on the link to activate your blog

7. The link in your email will direct you here, write down this password (you can change it after you have logged in)

8. Click on Login with username and password (it’s in the email)

9. Your blog is set up and ready to go. You can now post to it (write an entry) and customize the presentation

10. By clicking on the links on the dashboard, you can write a post, update your profile, change your password, manage comments and change your site’s look and feel (with easy to use templates)

Here are a couple of video tutorials on using Wordpress (same as Edublogs)

Short one:

Long one: