Techlearning blog

WIKIS
In classroom and professional development contexts, wikis are great for collaborative projects. I have started using wikis since this summer to share curricula for educational technology workshops I offer. A wiki is perfect for this, because pages are so easy to edit and update, and others can make contributions as well. I've been working with the educational technology staff of Tulsa Public Schools in Oklahoma to develop a series of six workshops on digital storytelling, podcasting, e-whiteboards, virtual field trips, collaborative classroom videoconferences and webquesting. The wikispace we've used is fantastic because it not only permits multiple people to update and contribute, but also tracks the contributions different people make.

Vicki Davis' post to her Cool Cat Teacher Blog from last December titled, "Wiki Wiki Teaching- The art of using wiki pages to teach" includes some great examples and tips for using wikis in the classroom with students. It isn't huge, but the collaborative wiki we built this summer for the Mid-America Technology Institute in Winfield, Kansas worked really well. Different conference presenters were able to access the wiki and add links to their own handouts and websites. Some created their own pages on the wiki to share links and resources.

The two best free wiki tools for educators that I'm aware of are PBwiki and Wikispaces. I like the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface of Wikispaces, but the fact that a wiki on PBwiki can be private without paying is a real advantage in the classroom.

BLOGS
David Warlick associates blogs more with "publishing" in more of a formal writing sense when he differentiates them from wikis. To me, blogs are unique because of the chronological index they provide on discrete topics. True, many bloggging tools permit "categories" to organize posts, but blogs seem to be best when sharing different ideas over time. When a group is working on a shared product, a wiki makes more sense to use rather than a blog. When publishing student work, however, or generating conversation about different topics at a conference, a blog may be better suited to the task than a wiki.

Student blog posts listed on high school math teacher Darren Kuropatwa's Scribe Post Hall of Fame are among some of the best examples I've seen of great classroom blog posts. Clarence Fisher's aggregated superglu page of student blog posts from 7th and 8th grade students at his school also contains good examples of student blogging. From a professional development perspective, the blogs for the upcoming FREE online conferences Global Learn Day and K-12 Online Conference are good examples. The SITE 2006 Digital Storytelling blog is an example of a thematic blog associated with a professional conference.

Conversations can be and are maintained through blogs even when people are not posting to the same blog site. This past summer at NECC 2006, a wide variety of attendees helped document the conference with blogs and podcasts. These conversations are connected (in many cases) via their Technorati tags. A Technorati search for the tag "NECC06" for example, turns up a large number of posts relating to the conference. These results are related to NECC (in most cases) and can be viewed chronologically, but are not clearly organized like threads in an online discussion.

MOODLE
So when should teachers and students use a tool like Moodle? Moodle is a free, open source course management solution similar to expensive alternatives like Blackboard or WebCT. Moodle courses can be organized topically or chronologically, with a different entry for each meeting date of a class, for example. Moodle environments offer the choice for students to create collaborative wikis, and since version 1.6 supports user blogs. Moodle offers the ability to host threaded discussions too, however, which can be comparatively more organized than a series of blog posts (especially on different blog sites) and reflect the contributions of different people more directly than a wiki can.

My recommendation is that if a classroom teacher can, s/he should start using web 2.0 tools by using Moodle. Moodle offers SO MUCH, and once a teacher has a Moodle course it is relatively easy to add additional features. Use of Moodle can exemplify a goal of blending learning between face-to-face (F2F) and virtual environments. By using the latest release of Moodle, a teacher doesn't have to decide between "blog or wiki." Students can explore these tools alongside their teacher and discover via their own experiences what the relative benefits and drawbacks are to each tool.

If you have other ideas about when a wiki, a blog, or a Moodle course is most appropriate for a given educational context, I'd love to read your comments!

For a great list of other web 2.0 tools of interest to teachers and students, check out Solution Watch's post "Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0" from last month.