About+this+Wiki

This wiki was originally created as a resource for teachers at **Wedderburn College** in Victoria, Australia. Teachers are encouraged to contribute ideas, links and resources to the pages. It is hoped that it will make life a little bit easier for teachers who are interested in using technology in the classroom and in their everyday work. Much of the focus in this wiki is on [|Web 2.0] applications and tools that are available for teachers and students to use to create, enhance, engage, stimulate and demonstrate new learning.

I have moved on from Wedderburn College and now work at the Loddon Mallee region managing two major projects, the 1 to 1 project and the introduction and rollout of the Ultranet. It's a very exciting time to be in education.

Working with Wikis at Wedderburn College
Although I don't work at Wedderburn any more the outline below of one way to use wikis might be useful to those interested in online learning. Wedderburn College is a small P-12 school in North West Victoria situated an hour from Bendigo and 2 hours from Melbourne. We have been using wikis as an online presence for the past 12 months with great success. Our main wiki is our ‘portal wiki’ www.wedderburn-collegeP12.wikispaces.com. On this wiki is posted information and teaching and learning ideas for teachers. Also from this wiki, links go to class wikis, individual student wikis and sub-school wikis. The next task was to have students create pages for their portfolio, create navigation links, insert text and upload photos and banners. Once the basics were taught then it was just a matter of exploring what other Web2.0 applications were out there to enhance the wikis. Applications such as [|PhotoBucket], [|Flickr], [|Bookr], [|VoiceThread], [|Slideshare] and many others have been used to post creations and reflections onto the wikifolios. A wiki is also a perfect repository for class lessons and activities. Our school conducts an ICT video conferencing class for Years 11 and 12 VCE and each class has their own wiki where they access class work, lesson plans, teacher instructions. Each student has their own page on which they upload work to be handed into the teacher. The teacher can then upload any corrected work via the student’s page or the shared pages on the wiki. Years 7 & 8 ICT classes are also documented on wikis. Each week the teacher posts the outline of the lesson with links and images to enhance the presentation. This results in not only an effective way to outline the expectations of each lesson and homework but is also a dynamic record of the course. Wikis are also an amazing resource to use when students from different schools are collaborating in a learning activity. Wedderburn is currently working with a school in Andale, Kansas USA exploring issues around global warming and the way individuals make a difference. Through the use of a shared wiki students are working in teams to plan, share and collaborate on common tasks. Teachers from both schools also use the wiki to upload ideas images and plans to be shared.
 * Creating e-portfolios.** The versatility of wikis has encouraged us to try using them in different ways. Late in 2006 we decided to trial using them as a digital portfolio for students in Years 7-9. The logistics were reasonably simple. We had all students sign up with an individual account in Wikispaces. Their log in had to be the alpha/numerical number that is used at the school to identify each student. We felt that this was a relatively safe way to have students create accounts as it didn’t readily identify any particular student except at the school level. We then had each student create their own wikispace which was also called by the same student identification. These spaces were deemed private. This meant that only the creator and those she invites are able to see the wikispace. A requirement was that they invite their teacher to their wikispace.