Wikis and Blogs in Middle School Latin

[elise.montgomery]

Below is a portion of an email I sent regarding the use of technology in my Middle School Latin classes:

My students (middle school aged) participate in Wiki translations and Blog composition exercises through my schools private website as well as create their own PowerPoint presentations and upload notes, etc. to my private SharePoint site. These exercises not only help them become more acquainted with the different computer resources, but it also allows them to have peer feedback and review both in class and at home. Also, this has allowed my students who have been sent to alternative school for a time to keep up with what is going on in Latin class.

Being fairly technolocally proficient, I enjoy exploring the different options I have for bringing technology into my Latin class to reach my students (in a time when all of my students are on MySpace at home and texting throughout class). END EMAIL

I appreciate any feedback about my Blog/Wiki experiment or alternative ideas for using Blogs or Wikis or any other online sources (after all, most of my students are constantly on MySpace, YouTube, etc. when they are at home).

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Elise, the ning.com system itself is one that has a lot of flexibility, since it integrates the blogs into a community. There's a ning focused on educational technology, where you will find a lot of middle school teachers sharing the different activities they do with their students - wikis, blogs, podcasting, and so on - I've learned a lot from reading the contributions and ideas people have shared here:
Classroom2.0 ning

[Lauren Hempstead]

Have you ever used wikispaces? My Latin teacher introduced it to us earlier this year and we've found it highly helpful for spreading information to the students.

Here's what we've done so far:
http://wshslatin.wikispaces.com/

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Lauren, that looks great - I am really impressed that so many people are contributing to the wiki! I like the way wikispaces lets you include Word documents and stuff like that also (I looked at the Certamen section and saw some Word stuff there).

In my classes, the students all publish blogs and websites, rather than sharing the same wiki. They get all excited about making their websites look different from each other (some people want black backgrounds, other people want everything all pink!) - by having different websites, they can kind of put their own individual expression into the way it looks.

Wikis are a great way to share information together in a single site, though - and they are so fast and easy to use! We are really lucky with online learning these days, having all these options - wikis! blogs! websites! whoo-hoo! :-)