Response to Em's Results (Kim)

I chose to incorporate a wiki into my language arts instruction to determine whether writing an electronic response would be more effective than having students produce a hand-written response. It may help to immediately define what you mean by "more effective", as this could be determined in a variety of different ways, depending on what you are hoping for your students to achieve. I collected data for a period of two weeks about the quality of students' written responses to text before implementing the wiki in my classroom. It may also be a good idea to discuss what kind of responses these are - personal connections? analysis of character? reaction? prediction? Sorry to be a total English teacher here... I set different goals for each student depending on their current level of responding to text. Great differentiation for the variance of students within the population. Some students were expected to produce a written response of greater value on the wiki than a written response. Others, were expeccted to produce a written response that was of equal or greater quality than the hand-written response. Great differentiation for the variance of students within the population. I am a little unsure of what you mean by "value" and "quality" - how was this determined? I was hoping that the collaboration that the wiki would provide and enable could help students to think of a more-developed response. I like that you integrated a piece of your goals here.

During the wiki lessons, student responses showed improvements. None of the students performed worse on electronic responses than written responses. Was this based upon point or grade allotment of work? Was it based off of a rubric? Upon examination of student responses on the wiki, there was evidence to support the fact that students incorporated ideas from their partners in their responses. They were also able to dispute ideas of their partners that they did not agree with and provide evidence from the text to jusitfy their position. Great point here about the added bonus of wiki use.

The wiki also increased student motivation, interest and cooperation. My third graders were motivated to publish their responses to the class wiki. They enjoyed being able to quickly read and respond to the thoughts of numerous peers in one day. Students also were able to access the wiki from home, and continued to write and respond to one another from home, even though I had not asked them to do this. Students were able to agree or disagree respectively with one another on the wiki by using information from their own post and the text their group had read. Also powerful points within this paragraph that actually expands upon the initial expectations of written work, and branches into motivation, interest and cooperation.