Classroom Wiki (My ECMP Final Project)
It’s done! After much work, I have created a classroom wiki for my final project: Miss Little’s Online Art Classroom. I used the one-month long unit of Visual Art 30 curriculum that I created for my Education Professional Studies 100 class, so that I had a strong idea of how this project would apply to the real curriculum I will be teaching in the future. It really helped to know beforehand what this wiki needed to accomodate.
I chose to create a wiki because it accomodated many different tools that I wanted to use, and because it allowed for class collaboration. For example, I really wanted the information that the students came up with in the group research assignment to be available to everyone, not just the students who found it. This way, the students are collaboratively making their own resources for this unit.
I created this wiki using Wet Paint, a wonderful site for creating wikis. It has several features that are very helpful to educators, such as the option to use pre-set classroom templates (which I did, but ended up altering greatly for my personal needs), and the ability to remove all advertising from education wikis. Visually, Wet Paint wikis are very eye-catching, and you can download extra little design elements that will compliment whichever theme you choose.
The only real difficulties that I found with creating this wiki was that sometimes the Wet Paint formatting functions are a little fickle. Just a heads up. However, when they do work, you can make a beautifully laid-out web page. I would also recommend that anyone creating a class wiki should SPELL CHECK EVERY PAGE. Nothing is more irritating and unprofessional than spelling mistakes on a web page. Don’t assume that because you’re a good typist, you didn’t make any mistakes.
Please, let me know what you think of my wiki, or feel free to ask any questions.
Nicole Little's Weblog 
Hey Nicole, nice wiki page. It actually looks like a real wiki that could be used. How did you design your lessons, did you look things up in the Sask learning curriculum? What age group do you think this wiki would be suited for? I wanted to create a page for your wiki site ,but it looks like I have to create my own wiki before then. I think this would be really fun to do and useful for students. I think once I have a better idea of how to plan lessons I will make a wiki and start writing out my lesson plans for the future. Thanks for sharing.
April 24, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Yes, I used Sask Evergreen Curriculum content. The lesson plan that I based my wiki on is one complete modlue of the Visual Art 30 curriculum. I’ve linked to the curriculum on the wiki. It’s geared towards grade twelve students, and the idea would be to have the class all create accounts, and then they would be able to edit the content of the site, which is part of some of the assignments.
If you’re interested in creating wikis, Tera, definately give Wet Paint a try.
– for some reason, your comment showed up in my spam, and I didn’t get a notification about it. Does anyone know why this would happen, even though you’ve commented on my blog several times?
April 25, 2008 at 5:20 am