Year 11 VCE English students working towards the outcome Creating and Presenting are creating wikis and blogs for this as they are completing their work for the new Context Technology and Communication. Obviously this creates interesting times in the classroom. Sometimes in unexptected ways. Year 11 boys thought that taboo words for the female pudendum would make great wiki names. Hmmm… that little talk that I gave about appropriateness didn’t go astray. Once we’d crossed that hurdle, we had more year 11 boys who thought that it would be fun to copy each other’s passwords. Eventually we got a few wikis created, but not much written on them yet.
Believe it or not, this lesson started off with a discussion of wikis and their usefulness and pitfalls. We looked at the critieria of wikis on Wikipedia and we identified the pros and cons. Wikipedia, however, did not know that I would be doing this with year 11 boys. At the end of the lesson most students had their own site up and running and we will persevere. They are going to create them in response to a book that we’re studying (without actually reading it of course) The Longest Memory by Fred D’Aguiar. Once we get into this they will be blogging and creating wikis or Yahoo 360 pages about the themes in the novel. Some have begun some research on this already and will then go on to use this in the pages they create. Hopefully this is more engaging than writing more text response essays.
If I sound a little negative, it’s because the classroom management aspects of doing this are substantial and I have just finished the class 🙂
It is something that I feel strongly about and I will plod on and hopefully the students will become more interested in it as time goes on and we have a few more to look at. Needless to say, working with a predominantly male class periods 5 and 6 is never completely boring. Lucky I really do like them.