Reporting Research using Wikis
Organizing the Wiki
I chose to use Wikispaces to make our project because it is free, there are no ads on educational wikis, and the teacher can set up accounts for the students without need to have email addresses.
The first time I did this project (during first quarter), each student created their own page. The students felt a great sense of ownership and accomplishment for making their own page. Some did better than others with following the directions, researching, and proofreading their work.
The second quarter I had the students work with a partner. The quality of the information and the design of the pages improved when the students could help each other. However we had a few conflicts between partners and sometimes one person did most of the work.
If possible, next year I would like to have students collaborate on their pages with students who are located in other parts of the country.
Students used their research to 1) create a page with at least 10 sentences with information about their park, 2) use some text formatting tools to emphasize titles and information, 3) insert one or two images, and 4) add citations with links to the webpages used for research and images.
Here is a link to the wiki page that our students created. The main page has links to the resources that the students used. Click on the names of the National Parks on the left side to view the pages.
The National Park Project Wiki
I've attached the worksheet below that I gave to the students for this portion of the project. It explains step by step how to edit the wiki page. Feel free to adapt for your own use in your classroom.
First published on Mar 10, 2009.
