Mr. Bariexca’s Honors British Literature Wiki

Was totally intrigued by Mr. Bariexica's Honors British literature Wiki from Spring 2008. (He's northern hemisphere — we need to stop using seasons and should rather use quarters, I think to bridge this hemisphere thing.)

I think he's done a nice job of organizing.  Many teachers do take this approach — one wiki for one course – however, I've found having a wiki for all of my classes and then archiving the old items and saving templates from the lesson plans to reuse for major items — as well as let students see prior work of other students (which helps the learning curve considerably.)  (See my assignments from last week in Computer Science where I referred to work from prior years.)

I particularly like the outline on the side of Mr. Bariexica's class consisting of the introduction, the major content, and then the class notes.  The only suggestion I'd give on class notes is to have them write their class notes in a Google Doc and embed the class notes onto a wiki page – this would give you the best of both worlds – having it on the wiki for everyone to see, but allowing simultaneous editing.

Using Google Calendar with your wiki will help you immeasurably. Although there are other ways to do this, I embed each class calendar on the individual class pages but then also publish an overall schedule so elementary teachers can schedule when they wish to come in the computer lab.  Many teachers have content management systems and supposedly they have calendars in there as well.

The point here is though, that there are many ways that this can be done, but to have a consistent structure and stick with it so that students can be easily oriented to what they are doing in the space and the protocols and actions for working within your online classroom.

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