Subject area: Language Arts, Technology
Grade level: Third
Lesson title: What is a wiki? Nine-year-olds collaborate to design a definition

Brief lesson description

One of the most notable distinctions of the beginning of the 21st century has been the rapid advance in technology. Internet accessibility for many, mass ownership of personal computers, combined with accessible forums for anyone with a computer to voice an opinion has created a situation where different skills are required for 21st century citizens. Education is slowly beginning to change its delivery to one that is more current with society’s needs. In this lesson, the author aims to change the typical delivery of a lesson from students as recipients of information from an instructor to students who act on the information they experience and collaborate to create a product others can benefit from.
This lesson has many purposes, though the most important one is to prepare students in a third grade class for 21st century online collaboration. The lesson provides hands-on experience with a wiki. Instead of providing a teacher definition, the students themselves will build the definition of a process they will have experienced.
WI State Standard – Learning Target(s) addressed:

3rd Grade Language Arts:

• Organize sentences into paragraphs. Organize paragraphs to build on an idea.
• Revise and edit their writing using proper grammar and spelling.

NETS-S technology standard addressed:
1. Creativity and Innovation: Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology.
2. Communication and Collaboration: Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others.
Technology resources needed (hardware and software)
Laptops, internet connection, access to a room at MPS’ Student Learning Community

Procedure:

Hook/Engagement: The teacher shows the class a rectangular cake. She tells the students a person, new to this country and this language, wants to know what “cake” is. The class will have to use words to describe the cake.

Vocabulary: post, edit, save

Focused Instruction “Let me show you something: this is how we can all work together to create a definition of this word.” The teacher has already created a wiki with very basic information such as: “A cake is round.” She promotes a discussion to determine if that sentence tells everything a person needs to know to understand what a cake is. Students who disagree are invited to edit, post, and save their replies. The process of editing and saving gets to be repeated over and over as students change or add responses to the class definition of “cake”.

Guided Practice: “Let’s do it together with different words.” The students work on definitions of “bubble gum, candy bar, goo”. Teacher paces the room and encourages students that are not participating to do so. After the class is finished collaborating on the definitions, the teacher informs the students that the term for what they were doing is a wiki.

Added Vocabulary: wiki

Independent Practice: “Now you try.” Students work on a group definition of a wiki.

Assessment Method: Feedback will be provided in two forms: collectively while the discussion is going on and individually, as the teacher paces the room and provides quick feedback to students that might not be participating or are not encouraging others to participate.
Assessment will consist of teacher notes.

Explanation, purpose, and features

This lesson has many purposes. It has been selected as one step on a continuum to prepare a class of third grade students for online collaboration. The lesson provides hands-on experience with a wiki, a “collaborative workspace where anyone can edit content that has already been published” (Richardson, 2006). Instead of providing a teacher definition, and then practice, the librarian decides to have the students themselves work on a wiki related to terms they know well, then build the wiki’s definition based on their shared experience.
The first lesson begins small and simple: teacher provides modeling of wiki work while the class defines the word “cake”. Students move to guided practice while working in teams to define the words “bubble gum, candy bar, and goo”. This lesson eventually culminates with wiki essentials, as students collaborate online to establish a definition of the word “wiki” based on their experience. Further lessons will promote wiki work as teams develop library terms definitions they will eventually post at the library page (barcode, spine, verso, holds, etc). The goal is that the students will collaborate on book reviews to post at the library room. Lastly, this experience will prepare students to transfer what they have learned to their classroom page, where other subjects such as science, Spanish, social studies, and math will be incorporated.

The librarian in this school has created a room at the district’s student online learning community, which uses Moodle as the course management platform. This room, available only through an enrollment key to the students at her school, has several features that promote online collaboration. Wikis, dictionaries, and forums are available. Unfortunately, blogs are not available at this time to students in this setting. The librarian initially presented this student learning community to two teachers at the school and, after taking all the required coursework necessary to create and maintain these rooms, both teachers have thus created their own classroom online rooms.

Effectiveness of this medium

The school this librarian works for promotes cooperative learning as a way for students to act on the knowledge they acquire. Students are used to working as teams, to collaborate at tables or selected groupings to come to an understanding or create a product. However, although web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, provide more efficient ways to attain this, this school has stayed behind by using 20th century methods such as paper and pencil. It is the librarian’s intention to work with a classroom teacher and the special education teacher to introduce online collaboration to the students. They aim to scaffold the students so they feel comfortable using features of the library’s student learning community room (slc) and then move them over to their classroom room at the slc. They want to tap into the students’ thirst for technology and at the same time get them to experience how students can work together online as teams to create a product useful to others.

Several reasons influenced the librarian’s decision to choose a wiki over a blog. First of all, for reasons no one has been able to explain to the librarian, the district’s student learning community’s set-up does not allow for student blogs. (Teachers can have modified blogs at the teacher learning community.) Since the librarian and the classroom teacher want to provide the students with online practice in a controlled environment, the use of this room, though limited slightly, has been chosen as the route to go. Another reason, expressed previously, is the librarian’s thought that students need to learn how to collaborate online, and a wiki is provides such experience. Lastly, practice with entries similar to blogs can be promoted by the use of forums, something that is easily created at the student learning community rooms.

The use of wikis in the classroom will provide students with opportunities to publish, edit, and revise content, yet a lot more should be happening while this collaboration is going on. Through wiki work, students will learn how to negotiate with others about correctness, relevance, meaning, grammar, and more (Richardson, 2006).

Reflections on the lesson

Before students could work on a wiki, they need to learn how to navigate on the student learning community. Considering that these are students have had very little computer experience, every step to navigating in the room has to be considered. That involves teaching students how to log in and log off, respond to a prompt on a forum, and complete their profile information. The librarian anticipates that before the teachers are finished with the first lesson, some students will have figured out how to send messages to each other, and that is fine. Further lessons will be planned on digital citizenship and staying on task. Table groupings will make managing the groups more efficient, as students will be encouraged to help each other.

This lesson is also teaching the librarian how to work with groups so they will be able to use the library’s page at the Student Learning Community and have a voice. The objective is to begin with the third graders so as they move up in the grades at this elementary school, they will be learning how to “operate in a world where the creating of knowledge and information is more and more becoming a group effort” (Richardson, 2006). The librarian also agrees with Baggetun, in that “blogs and wikis could be one way of nurturing the relationship between schooling and the outside world, and learning as participation, drawing from both spheres in creating richer opportunities for more meaningful learning” (2007).

References:

Baggetun, R. (2007). Emergent web practices and new educational opportunities. Version 0.1-4 Revista Telos: cuadernos de comunicación, tecnología y sociedad. Accessed 3/21/2008 at:

http://www.campusred.net/telos/articulocuaderno.asp?idarticulo=9&rev=67

Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Corwin Press, CA.

We will pay close attention from now on. Sophie says we need to look at the hallway and listen, maybe someone passing by will be talking about her and we will pick up some bits of information. I say we need to hope the engineer talks to someone while feeding us and we will get the entire story.

Shirley says wah, wah, I want mommy (she is a baby). Okay, spiders don’t act like that, they could care less about their mothers. Shirley says to be patient and we will find out when the librarian gets here.

Last December the librarian received a call from the folks at the pet shop informing her that the spider she had been waiting for had arrived. This spider, a very tiny choko golden, was waiting for her and she had to go pick her up. On a very cold night she went, bought the spider, placed her in her leather glove, then inside her coat pocket, and took her home. At home she thought the spider would be crammed in such a small enclosure (it was similar to a pill box), so she took her out and placed her in a small pet carrier, the plastic kind where kids put hermit crabs. By then it was late and she went to sleep.

The next morning when she went to see her new friend she was gone! The little spider had disappeared. The librarian looked everywhere in her room, but found no signs of the spider anywhere. Saddened, she went to school and went on with her life, thinking any day she would find the shriveled carcass of her baby spider.

One night two months later,  as she unfastened her sneakers, she looked down and there was the spider, waving hello! The librarian carefully picked her up, placed her in a well-sealed container, and took her to school. By then the librarian already had purchased Shirley Spydelle, so it was a joy to be able to compare one and the other. It wasn’t difficult to come up with a name for the new spider: Houdina it would be! She was definitely an escape artist.

The sad part is that the story doesn’t end there. Once at school, Houdina  managed to escape again. She hasn’t been seen, even though the librarian has moved every shelf surrounding the cage. Maybe in two months she will return. We certainly hope so, since she is getting too much attention.

The first photo showcases Sophie Titina, who has been the librarian’s friend for over 8 years. Sophie’s name comes from a picture book in English, Sophie’s Masterpiece by Eileen Spinelli, and a poem/song in Spanish, La hormiga Titina, by Argentinean author Maria Elena Walsh.

Next is Krista, right by the bus. Krista is about two years old, and

her name comes from a library volunteer, who would always come in to the library to greet the arachnids first!

Last is Shirley Spydelle, who is so small, she managed to climb on the mini bus. Shirley must be less than a year old, and her name comes from a character in the series Secrets of Dripping Fang.

for letting us show their picture until we can take one ourselves.

Her name is Shirley Spydelle. Yes, she happens to be named just as Professor Spydelle’s wife in The Secrets of Dripping Fang series by Dan Greenburg.   And yes, she is also a spider. She is a Choko Golden and from what we have heard, she will get to grow bigger than Sophie. Now Sophie is getting a bit on the large size group, so it will be interesting to see how big Shirley can get. Stay tuned, for we will ask the librarian to post some pictures soon.

~Krista

So both Sophie and I decided to invite young readers to find books about tarantulas. Now that school is out and there is more time for reading, we invite you to go visit the public library and ask one of the friendly librarians to help you track a few good books about us hairy fellows. Once you find a great book, drop us a line and we will include it here. Tell us why you think it is a great book. Hey, maybe we can jointly put together a recommended book list for tarantula fans!

 Since you know we are well-informed library tarantulas who enjoy listening to library conversations, we thought we would share with you what we found out about the book the librarian searched. An Interview with Harry the Tarantula, written by Leigh Ann Tyson, and illustrated by Henrik Drescher, is funny, yet full of true facts about us eight-legged darlings. We heard the librarian say that the author did quite a lot of research about spiders and consulted with entomology expects to make sure the facts in the book were correct. That is perfect!  Now, in our opinion, while the text is great and the illustrations of reporter Katy Did of KBUG Radio cute, Harry is pictured as an eight-legged, too-many-teeth goofball. That is the only part we did not like, thought you must know that tarantulas have a different sense of humor than humans, and some humans might consider the illustrations funny. We heard the librarian say that the book could be purchased at the National Geographic site, so we went ahead and linked it to the title of the book. So tarantula enthusiasts everywhere, go to your public library and start reading!