Interactive English/Language Arts wikis

Wow,
This is coold how you let the students run wild very nice.  Better yet very fun....

I loved your wiki! You have given me some great ideas, but now I have to organize my thoughts and put my wiki together. I am waiting to learn more during the PBWiki summer camp, but you have truly been an inspiration.

I love your wiki pages, but I must not be reading them correctly, because I don't see anything that approaches chaotic.  There are 8 comments on the first wiki, and for the others, when I looked at the "blogging" pages in the sidebar (e.g., the ones for Fahrenheit 451), they seemed quite orderly and intelligently written.  Am I missing something?  Please help me navigate to the chaos.  (As a 6th grade language arts teacher, I'm a firm believer in organized chaos.)  So, I'd like to see how it worked here.  Thank you!  --julie

My favorite part of your wiki is the comment section where you can interact with students outside of class in a less formal way. Very cool.

Hi Julie,
Hm. Maybe "liberating" is a better description than "chaotic"? Both students and I feel so much freer with this kind of forum. We have lots of classroom discussion, too. Students told me on a survey at the end of the year that other classes were jealous of ours because of all the student input! Imagine--to me (and to you, I'm sure) this is the highest of compliments!

It also seem like a good tool for you as a teacher to keep organised, and to build upon resources from previous years, rather than reinventing the wheel each time you teach a text. It seems like it's growing really well.

Here are two of my classroom wikis for English/Language Arts. [url]-my-pedia.pbworks.com and [url] I encourage lots of student interaction on the wiki, and sometimes this gets a little chaotic, but the students are so enthusiastic that we ignore anychaos. Students can edit any page. The last picture was a dead bird for To Kill a Mockingbird! Students post projects. They blog. Fun! Your comments would be greatly appreciated!

-jenn

I really like your wikis, great job. I especially liked the feature of archeived front pages- how did you do that? Did you just copy the page from the front page and inserted to another page, or is there a special trick?

1. I like the idea on the two wikis of having a place where you can post all those interesting contests, etc. that come up. They now have an ongoing home on the wiki.

2. An issue that always comes up, especially that many of us are dealing with smaller copy budgets at our school: How much to you print out? The example wikis have study guides, homework guides, etc.--items that many students like to keep in their folder, especially if they can't consult a computer at home while doing projects and homework. It would be great to be able to not hand out oodles of paper and keep everything online. On the other hand, hard copies may be very necessary for those without computers, those who need a paper copy to work with because of various special education issues. The computer allows people to manipulate with color font sizes, etc. so many pro's and con's!!!
Joy

These are very cool wiki's!  Although I teach math and science, occasionally I have a student who has completed all math/science requirements (so they say), and until I can prove otherwise, I allow them to study their English or another content curriculum.  These pages would help immensely in that task; may I have access so that I can share with my students?

Thanks for sharing your wikis. They gave me many ideas of what to do with my students next year. I'll be teaching almost the same topics in a foreign language classroom (grade 12).

While being in the camp  I have been working on my new WIKI. This wiki is intended to accompany my textbook for grade 11 as an additional resource bank for teachers and students. I try to gather here materials I come across in the web and also ideas that prop into my mind while browsing web. Hopefully, other teachers who use my textbook (out of print in two weeks) will join this wiki and cotribute as well. 
Check it out- here it is, still much in progress- texts and videos lack tasks- but they are coming
 http://teachpuzzle11.pbworks.com/