Is this wiki ready to rumble?

Putting the finishing touches on the wiki project.

It's going to serve more as additional support our next unit, rather than be a truly collaborative venture. Students are selecting between three titles - Black Boy, The Color of Water, and Frankenstein. Once in their Literature Circle groups, they are required to set up a reading schedule, organize small-group discussions, and generate questions, responses, and connections to the novel. Standard fare for the Miller's English @ BHS experience circa 2005. The 21st century twist now is that each group will be responsible for maintaining a record of their discussions, their questions, their comments to one another, their thoughts on their reading. All of this will be put on the class wiki. In the past, much of the notes, passages, role sheets and other materials were kept in a folder as a reference. It really turned into a folder with lots of different kinds of paper in it. I hope the wiki will encourage further collaboration and help open the students' eyes to the work and ideas of their classmates.

I'll keep you posted.

Disclaimer: My rubric for the project was borrowed heavily from the one at the flatclassroom project. If you haven't checked out that wiki or Vicki Davis' Cool Cat Teacher blog, do it.

Product plug: I decided to use Wikispaces instead of PBwiki. Although I like how PBwiki lets you set up a simple password to allow editing, I think wikispaces offers much more variety and ease of use in its interface. Embedding html and pictures is a lot simpler and more understandable with wikispaces.