Response to Em'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, critiqued the response of a partner, used editing and revising skills and worked as a group to compose a response. These are all really powerful statements that displays now only how this allowed for a personal goal, but allowed for a curricular goal as well. Personal goals that parallel curricular goals are essential, as this shows a purpose in the implementation of technology.

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. Would this similar assignment be with the use of technology, as in, completing a comparative study? I agree that this would be intriguing, as it would help to validate and perhaps to even extend the conclusions you found and would help to determine if your students have improved with typing and word processing skills, and it would help you to understand whether or not they work better collaboratively with the tech tool, without the typing becoming an impediment for collaboration and work in general. This is a really interesting point, and is one that I would have never foreseen, considering my high school students have had extreme experience with word processing!

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. I wonder if, now that we have worked to consolidate these objectives, they would be a bit easier to achieve. The Likert scale was not as valuable as I thought it might be. Frustrating! 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. Perhaps this tool is better used for publishing student work and having students freely comment on the work, rather than using it for in-class collaboration, as the typing may continue to be an issue. Your honesty here is extremely important in your findings and includes reasons for student difficulty at achieving the objectives; ones that I had never thought of before. I think you also pose some interesting ideas here - could students have an increased achievement with this tool now, seeing as they now have more experience at using technology and word processing? Well done!