The video that we watched was about the creation of a collaborative wiki for teachers. The teachers wanted a place to share their creations (lessons plans, activities, ressources) with teachers of other districts or even of other states. They created a wiki where they could post their ideas and share them to the public. First only teachers from the same school could edit the wiki but now even other disctricts can add their creations to the wiki. It becomes a great ressouce for teachers and can really help for the preparation. It is a good way to know how it works it other schools too.
I think that a collaborative wiki among teachers is a very good idea! It can really help teachers in sharing their ideas. It can also help having feedback on your creations. If someone edits your lesson plan, you can see it another way and see the improvement. Also, any teacher can use it easily. As Sze (2008) says, it is easy to learn and to work with a wiki. This way, you can have a lot of teachers that contribute to the wiki and this gives a lot of different views and ideas. It makes a diversified collection of ressources for teaching.
I like the idea of sharing thoughts, teaching material and resources online. It is also good to know what other teachers and schools work on, and it might be a good thing to have them add comments and suggestions. However, I am not sure whether the editing part is a good thing. A teacher might just completely erase parts of our teaching material, just because she/he sees it differently (as there are diverse teaching approaches and classes of different levels). This could be one of the flaws that wikis have.
ReplyDeleteI too agree that collaborative wikis may be a good idea. However, Elodie has a good point; because of the different levels of students as well as the different levels of proficiency, adaptation is a must but let us not forget that lesson ideas are the main objective. The fact that modifications may be undertaken should not stop us, as a community, to share ideas and encourage innovation and creativity. What is your opinion on the matter Janie? do you agree?
ReplyDeleteUsing wikis between ESL teachers could be a very good idea since this will enable teachers to share their lesson plans. I would like to argue on what Elodie added. I think that if your are welling to share your materials, you supposed to be aware that as all future teachers, we have to adapt our materials to our classes. In this case, if your share your lesson plans, it is sure that people will work on it. I think it does not matter since you have the original version of yours.
ReplyDelete