Emily's Conclusions

Using the wiki for discussion of texts promoted more collaboration than had occured when students were hand-writing their responses. This practicum supported language arts goals from the curriculm because students read and responded to questions about a text they read, used evidence from the text to justify their ideas, crtiqiued the response of a partner, used editing and revising skills and worked as a group to compose a response.

These objectives could have been achieved without the use of a wiki. The wiki did support collaboration, but this could have occurred without the use of this technology. Word processing skills seemed to intefere with student responses. When I implemented this tool, it was the beginning of the year. Students did not have strong typing skills. At this point in the year, my students have had more opportunities to publish work through word processing. I would be interested to see how they did on a similar assignment now that their skills are stronger in writing an electronic response.

It was difficult for me to examine the data and make solid conclusions after this lesson. I believe this to be true because I had so many objectives, almost too many. The Likert scale was not as valuable as I thought it might be. My students did not have enough experience working with a wiki to form valid opinions about how this could enhance or change the quality of their work.

Students enjoyed being able to read the work of the peers, comment on their peers workspaces and read what their peers had written to them. We have since used the wiki in class, and students enjoy using it as a space to publish and share ideas. Students have also learned how to use the messaging feature and have been communicating with one another from home using this (like e-mail). I hope to find more ways to incorporate this tool into my instruction because my students truly do enjoy using it.