I was looking for a way for my students to work collaboratively on various class topics. TikiWiki looked like something my students might be able to use. After a few days reading the FAQs and asking a lot of newbie questions in online forums, I found a host and started setting up my site. TikiWiki is not for the faint of heart. I could not have handled setting up more student accounts. It has a way to set up student accounts using a data document, but I did not try it.
This is not really something that I am proud of, but I only had one student that actually liked TikiWiki. 80% of my students are EC with reading problems. My TikiWiki skills or lack there of, could have been a reason my students did not like it. Setting up user editing rights on the student's Wiki and Blogs in TikiWiki is not the easiest process.
TikiWiki seems to have a potential in K-12 environments. What will future versions of TikiWiki add to support teachers and students is not clear. Check out-- Edu.TikiWiki.org Here is a site that a history's class created-- Holocaust. It is will allow images to be uploaded to the server and included in Wikis. Students that I teach have trouble creating links and typing the Wiki code. You might want to view AulaWiki for secondary schools . I think this is what I should have tried, but I did not.
Experimenting with TikiWiki lead me to discover Moodle. My next post will include details on how I used it.
tag: Warlick, downers grove
4 comments:
Hi,
For what it's worth, a bunch of students recently started using Simpy for their courses. Simpy is a social bookmarking site that I see you mentioned in your previous blog entry - it's at http://simpy.com/
John, great summary of social bookmarking sites. I work for Yahoo! and saw that you mentioned My Web 1.0 Beta but didn't mention our new version - My Web v2.0. I think you might find it worth a look - it offers tags vs. single categories, the ability to invite friends (students, colleagues) to join you in your pursuit & sharing of knowledge, and the ability for you to tag & share interesting articles, websites, etc. with your search community, the world, or just with yourself. You can check it out at myweb2.search.yahoo.com.
Would love to get your thoughts if you get a chance to try it.
John: this is David Jakes in Downers Grove, thanks for putting the tags in your blog entries for our workshop with David Warlick. This is an exciting time for all of us in education with the new tools at our disposal; I hope you benefit from the contributions of our workshop as I know our participants will benefit from your blog entries. David
Hi there, I'm sorry to hear TikiWiki didn't work for you. I have used it and liked it quite a bit, and my students really like it too--but I completely agree that it is difficult to learn and clunky to manage. In the context of your class, I can see how it would not be successful. One thing I did in the beginning was to create wiki pages for my students and encouraged them not to bother with formatting the text. There are other systems to use, though. I've heard Plone is much easier to administer.
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