Wiki – Group Project
The Wild and Wonderful Library Wiki
The Audience
The wiki will facilitate sharing of information by teachers in order to inform students and parents of current events, announcements and recent articles. The audience is encouraged to comment, share information and post useful information with the school wiki community. As the flow of information goes both ways, the target audience of the wiki is firstly students and parents, who are users and active participants of the wiki. Secondly, teachers are also the audience, since they contribute to the site content and they also receive comments, feedback and contributions from students and parents. The democratic nature of the wiki, where all members of the target audience can contribute and use information, will foster participation, school spirit and dialogue, as well as, interaction with new technology.
The Software
We selected PBworks to design our wiki, since it allowed for quick and intuitive design of our online space in minutes. The interactive wiki pages allow students, parents and teachers to view and edit from any computer at home or in the school, requiring only the login information to access the site. PBworks facilitates the long-term goal of school participation by all dedicated to furthering education at Emerson Valley Public School. Some of the other advantages offered by PBworks include the ability:
– To quickly share and edit pages
– To control access of pages with password and other privacy settings
– To create customized pages and posts through selection of multimedia content, colours and templates
– To collaboratively edit pages
– To foster group projects and discussions
– To easily invite students, parents and teachers by email to discussions
Specifically, The Emerson Valley Public School library wiki is a service that showcases work of students, advertises upcoming events and encourages discussion on lifestyle and curriculum related topics, including: Healthy eating, living, or on events such as the Vancouver Winter Olympics. The site will be accessible by both students and parents, which will hopefully provide families with a way to keep up with what is going on at school and in their children’s life. The wiki learning experience will also provide an opportunity for parents and children to share their knowledge of the technology, and work together to contribute to the wiki in a friendly, courteous manner as outlined in the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP).
Problems
Privacy
Privacy is a big concern for the school as well as for the parents. Students range from kindergarten to grade 6 and we want to be sure they are protected while posting online. PBworks platform was selected due to the ability to password protect login to the site. Each student and their parents have a password to login, read and contribute to the wiki pages. This restricts use of the site to only members affiliated with the school. Secondly, any post or edit made to any pages can be traced to the user, which can prevent abuse by malicious users. Furthermore, the school recommends that parents and children never post both their first and last names online for added safety. If the school posts photo(s) of students at an event, no names will be listed with the picture.
Open Sharing of Information
While privacy of students is a primary concerns, the school recognizes the importance of balancing privacy with providing an open platform to share and access information. Open debate and discussion is encouraged balanced with civil and respectful online discourse. The wiki is an open, collaborative effort where all members have equal power and responsibility to post, edit and comment on the school wiki.
Appropriate Use
The school has outlined to the students via their classroom teachers as well as to parents in the school newsletter about the new wiki that all posts should be respectful. Our AUP provides clear guidelines of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour on the wiki. As a school we want our wiki to be a place where people feel comfortable to post their work and experiment with the new technology. To ensure that wiki etiquette is followed the school librarian will be monitoring the site and will remove any inappropriate or offensive posts if they appear without any warning.
How to get students to use the wiki?
In order to encourage students initially to use the wiki the library is working with classroom teachers to make posting all or a part of their book report on the wiki a requirement of the assignment. Furthermore, students will be given at least fifteen minutes of library time each library period to post, read and experiment with the wiki. Parents have been provided information on the benefits of the wiki along with their own login information. With the shared nature of the wiki, we believe that all participants will in time make habit of posting, editing and commenting on site content. We believe this will strengthen the relationship between teachers, parents and students, and provide a forum for discussion and dialogue within The Emerson Valley Public School community.
Link to our Wiki -http://libraryforlearners.pbworks.com/
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