Wiki's to teach Amendments

[Janet Scott]

I created a Wiki for my government class and my students were assigned groups to teach certain amendments from the Bill of Rights.  I spent several periods trying to figure out how to link the pages --one of the pitfalls of Wiki Jason says--you have to know a bit of what you want before you start.  Anyway--I have 3 classes with 5 groups in each--so I have 15 pages going.  They have loved this assignment.  Each group has three amendments--so they have done a lot of collaboration.  They have loaded up video, glogsters, powerpoints, links to games and sites.  The glogster was a problem.  I paid for the 50 student membership--but my old glogster wasn't edu.  I had to contact them--and get it migrated over. (2 days).  We then went to the lab and the students didn't type in the edu before glogster--so they were firewalled and couldn't get in.  We have had all sorts of fun learning how to embed, save or link everything.

I will find out tomorrow how successful things were/are.  I like the ability to check out the student work--most did work directly on the Wiki--but I found a few groups used google docs.

I will definately use this again--they loved the lab time (I have set aside 6 days for lab work--and two weeks for this activity.  They have enough on the Wiki that I could get a grade now and just make use of what they have to teach it if I wanted--but I want them to have the fun of doing the lesson.  They took most snags in stride.  I don't know that my 7th EP would be as easy a group as the 8th Honors.

[amy underwood]

I use a wiki for my class to post projects and have found it to be the easiest program for me to use. (I'm sure the others are easy as well, but I know how to work with the kinks of the wiki a bit better.) I have also found that the students love being able to view their work at home. I would be very curious to know how it would work with your EP class! My LS colleagues and I have had many discussions about the different strengths/weaknesses within each class. Let me know if you decide to try it! Or maybe...you could have your EP classes use the Honors wiki for an assignment or two, then create their own??