Blogpost 1

My topic for this post has to do with the use of Wikipedia in the classroom and creating a class Wiki.
I wanted to explore this topic further after being a new teacher-librarian and after talking to several grade 6/7 teachers. I found some of them were getting tired of their students only doing research using Wikipedia and wanted them to be using something different for research. Coming from a primary background, and not having much technology or Internet experience, I did not know much about Wikipedia and only understood it to be an online encyclopedia. So why were some teachers getting tired of their students using only Wikipedia for research? I wanted to find out  more about Wikipedia and how it works and why some teachers may not love it.
What I learned is that Wikipedia is written by millions of authors who are constantly adding, deleting and revising the information in it. Most of the time the information is 100% accurate but occasionally errors are made intentionally or unintentionally. Usually these errors are corrected quickly but if you don't cross-reference your research with another website other than Wikipedia then it is possible for some of the information to be incorrect. Secondly, most of the authors writing Wikipedia entries are adults that are not necessarily using language or vocabulary that is easy for younger students to understand. In otherwords sometimes it's not a good choice to use for research for elementary students because it's written far above the grade level of comprehension.
I also wanted to learn more about Wikis. I hear the expression all the time, but until now have not really understood what the term meant.
I learned that the word Wiki is a short form of the Hawaiian word "wiki-wiki", which means quick (Will Richardson, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts.) So a Wiki is like a quick reference to information. The concept behind Wikis according to Will Richardson is that everyone together is smarter than anyone alone, so any entries made in a Wiki are collaborated, edited, and written by an online group interested in that topic. I didn't realize that there are Wikis for everything from recipes to travel spots to classroom wikis. I wanted to learn more about classroom Wikis. With classroom wikis, the students have a real opportunity to collaborate together. I wondered how teachers deal with a student going in and writing profanities or sabatoging the groups information but I read that the more the teacher hands over to the class the more ownership the students take over their Wiki and this is far less likely to happen. I am thinking of trying a class book report wiki after learning more about Wikis.