Collaborating and Contributing

This Week's Activities are due February 17, 2009.

 

There are several purposes for this week's activies:

1. to give you the opportunity to experience collaboration using a wiki.
2. to allow you to practice using wiki tools.
3. to give you exposure to additional technological tools and services that you could use in your classroom.
4. to provide a service by contributing to a resource to which classroom teachers, yourself included, can turn to for information about the technologies that are available for classroom use.

 

This week you need to several tasks; plan to spend approximately 2-2.5 hours on this week's work.  A good job this week will mean very little work next week.

• Comment on this week's Gospel Insights Presentation(s).  Think about the message as well as the presentation of the message.  What have you learned from their presentation?  How will you apply their message in your life?  What suggestions can you offer the author for making the presentation more effective?  What ideas does their presentation give you for future presentations that you may make?  (10 minutes)
• Watch the following video from Common Craft.  It may take some time to load properly.  If it does, just read the instructions below while you wait.  Also, if the video doesn't play smoothly, try pausing the video until you see "100%" show up in the writing near the right-hand side of the black staus bar on the bottom. 

The example of planning for the camping trip is a very simplistic use of a wiki.  Wikipedia is a much more complex example of a wiki.  One of the best educational uses of a wiki that I have seen involves having students use a wiki to coordinate class-wide research efforts and create a web-based textbook.  Our wiki activity for this class will be the start of a web-based guide to instructional tecnology for educators.  Future classes will build on your efforts, so give them a strong foundation. 

• Contribute to or comment on the Wiki Rubric.
• You will be working in groups on this assignment.  The groups have the following assignments.  
  • Group 1 - Tools for Managing Time, Tasks, etc. specifically Course Management Applications (Christopher Ross, Mindy Hinckley, --Christopher expressed interest in Moodle and Mindy expressed interest in online quizzes.  This set of tools includes Moodle and its competitors and allows for online quizzing.)
  • Group 2 - Tools for Creating, Editing, Collaborating, and Sharing, specifically Diagrams and Drawings (Christen Allen, Nicole Manwaring, Jennifer Hoggan, --Previous FACs Ed majors have found these tools useful, particularly for units on interior design.)
  • Group 3 - Tools for Managing Time, Tasks, Etc. specifcally Time and Task Management (McKenzie Borup, Kay Wynn, Meghan Christensen--These tools might be useful because they help individuals set goals and keep track of progress in ways that can allow for a degree of accountability to others.  These tools could be useful since Health deals with behavior change.)
  • Group 4 - Tools for Managing Time, Tasks, etc. specifically Information Management (Steven Hammari, Eric Pratt, Olivia Seger--This set of tools includes tools to help with research and also tools that can help with data collection and analysis.)
  • The first person named in each group will be responsible for creating a new page for your work and making sure that it links to an appropriate place on the Table of Contents.  Create a new page for your category by going to the Table of Contents, clicking on the Edit tab, highlighting your category, and inserting a new link  (the icon with the chain link in front of the globe).  Be sure to give your new page the same name that your category has in the table of contents (5 minutes).  Once this page is created, your group can use the comments section to discuss who will be responsible for doing what.
• Each member of the group will Draft a Wiki Article
  1. Research the the tools listed as under that the category in the Index.  Divide up the work amongst group members.  Perform web searches (30 minutes) to
     • find additional tools that should also be included in the category.  Add any additional tools to the list in the Index and include links
     • find information on "Best Practices" for using your group's category of technological tools.
     • find information on how to use specific tools (demonstrations, help sheets, etc).
  2. Decide which tools you will write complete articles for.  Also, one person in each group should write an article on "Best Practices" for the use of this category of tools in education.  For example, best practices for educational presentations, best practices for educational blogging, etc.  Use the comments section of your category's wiki page to divide up responsibilities for research, writing, and editing.  Be sure to divide up responsibilities for fact-checking and proof-reading other team members' work (10 minutes).
  3. Complete your research and write your articles.  Use the rubric to write your article. (45 minutes to 1 hour).

 

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