It’s 2am in the morning and I can’t sleep after my son woke me up. I’ve been lying in bed thinking about all manner of things. Do you remember ‘The Proclaimers’? They were two geeky looking Scottish guys with guitars who wrote a couple of catchy songs that were hits in the 80’s. (Still going strong according to their official site – they’ve even got a myspace page!) I was thinking about Wikis and their song, ‘I’m on my way’, came to mind. The title reflects how I feel about our adoption of Wikis in our School Library. We had pathfinders which were a static page of dewey numbers, keywords, and links that we devised for projects that teachers had set. They were great, but were limited because our Electonic Services Librarian was the only one who could make changes to these pages. They’re so much better now that we’ve started moving them over to Wikis. Now they’re a dynamic collaborative tool and everyone can have input – our Library staff, other teachers and students. Once again, the Lefevers at Commoncraft can explain a Wiki better than I!
I’m working with our Yr 11 Literature class on Monday morning to help them learn how to edit the Wiki our Library has set up for their class. The Wiki has pages for the texts they are studying and each student has their own page to chronicle their reading throughout the course of the year. I’m hoping the students are going to embrace this tool and that other teachers will see the benefits of this for their classes. We’re using PBwiki to create these online spaces and are making them password protected for privacy.
If we get time we may even lift our spirits watching this YouTube video featuring the song ‘I’m on my way’. Maggi137 has cleverly used the song to create a fanvid for the new Doctor Who, David Tennant.
Lucacept - intercepting the Web 