Resource Wiki

A few weeks ago in TPTE 486, we collaborated with the other Elementary Education students in Jeff's class to create a wiki that became a large database of resources. I enjoyed this resource wiki so much that I decided to write about it for one of my extra blog posts. Overall, I think the resource wiki is a great idea. I really liked searching the internet and finding great websites that my students can use in my future classroom. I also liked being able to share these resources with my fellow classmates. There have been many times in my education classes that I have found an amazing website that I really like and believe other people with minors in elementary education would like to know about but there is no way to communicate with them. This resource wiki gave me the opportunity to tell my fellow classmates about the websites I frequently use when I write lesson plans or look for interesting resources for my students. I also really liked this assignment because I was able to see all of the resources that my classmates use when they are planning lessons. Another aspect of this assignment I really liked was that each wiki included a page for Webquests. I really liked this because this summer is the first time I have been introduced to Webquests, and they are still very new to me. I am glad we included them on the resource wiki because I now have a list of great Webquests that my fellow classmates have scrutinized and deemed acceptable for use in our future classrooms. From my experience as a pre-intern, I know collaboration is a big part of being a teacher, and I am glad this assignment taught us how we can use technology to share resources. Thanks to the collaboration aspect of the wiki, we were all able to spend relatively little time finding a few resources that we were able to put together to create a huge database of helpful websites.

Although I really enjoyed these assignment, there were two small drawbacks that I noticed. First, I know a lot of people had trouble finding credible websites that were not already used by another student on the wiki. Luckily, I completed by annotations fairly quickly so my resources did not overlap with other people's. Even though it was not a problem for me, I know a lot of other people in our class were frustrated when they found a website, wrote an annotation, then saw that someone else had already created an entry for the website. The second  drawback I noticed about this wiki was that it was sometimes difficult to collaborate with people we had never met before in Jeff's class. If there were overlapping annotations or grammatical errors, no one in our class wanted to delete or edit an annotation from the other class because it simply felt rude to go in and change someone else's work without asking them. Aside from these two minor drawbacks, I really enjoyed creating the resource wiki, and I am happy I now have a long list of websites I can reference for my future classroom.

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