Tuesday, December 20, 2011

The Moodle Wiki

I set up a "Class Memories" Wiki on my Moodle site. I wanted to start out slow and see how it worked before I showed it to the whole class.  So today while most of my students were working on "Type to Learn,"  I asked one student to edit the Wiki.  While she was editing I asked two other students to log in and start editing.  They were both logged in and hit the edit button.  Instead of be allowed to edit at the same time as the first student, they were met with a message that stated they couldn't edit at this time because another student was editing.  

Once I established that only student could edit at a time, I did a quick mini-lesson and showed the students how they could edit the Wiki.  I also included a quick demonstration of how the history feature worked so everyone knew it wasn't anonymous.  After my mini-lesson I encouraged my students to add to the Wiki as they saw fit.  

No one took advantage of the invitation.  The only student to edit the Wiki was the initial student.  One other student did view the page, but she made no edit. 

I guess the "Class Memories" Wiki didn't capture their attention.  I now how to decide what to do with it.  Should I advertise and add to each day as a mini-lesson?  Should I require students to edit it one time?
Should I move to a more high tech Wiki, like WikiSpaces?  Or should I just forget about using a Wiki and be happy that they are blogging?  To be honest, I have no idea what I'm going to do..

2 comments:

  1. Often it seems that when students are given an invitation to do something, they often don't. Unfortunately if students, of any age, don't see it as something that must be done, they won't.

    Maybe you could have the students post on a certain topic like "What has been the funniest thing that has happened in the class this year?" or "What story have you like the most so far? Why?" Sometimes when students have a specific topic to address they feel more comfortable doing so.

    Or maybe they didn't want to try because they didn't want to get "kicked off" by the site.If that is the case, maybe you could assign certain students to be on the site in assigned time intervals. It be worth a try.

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  2. I thought about assigning a topic on the Wiki but then I remembered that I already assign one topic a week on the blog and didn’t want to overdo the digital writing.

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