Diane Albanese’s Musings

(As published in the Cape Gazette, May 4, 2007) 

What is a wiki? Students in my class would be happy to tell you. As a matter of fact, they were able to tell the Lieutenant Governor, John C. Carney Jr. last week at the Delaware Instructional Technology Conference in Dover.

Students from all over the state met in Dover to showcase some of their accomplishments using technology. Our display featured wikis, blogs and protopage. Eighteen other school districts had displays that highlighted the technology that they used. It was a star-studded night featuring students as the stars.

The LG gave a brief speech at this Showcase of Technology event and as he came down off the platform I asked him if he knew what a wiki was. He admitted that he did not so my students Danielle and Kim took him to our laptop display and demonstrated the benefits of our class wiki. They were full of enthusiasm as they extolled the virtues of a wiki and how most of the content and work they had done was saved on the wiki.

The Cape Henlopen Technology specialist and techno-angel to our class, Lori Roe, happily snapped pictures of the students. She knew them well from working countless hours with them in our classroom to perfect some podcasts that they made. Podcasting adds sound to text so that the student’s voices were recorded speaking their poems.

This was a golden moment for Lori and me. The students were so fired up about what they had accomplished that we had nothing left to do but take photos and beam like proud parents.

Speaking of parents, they were there to support us. This was an opportunity for parents to join in the fun and get a first-hand look at what we do in schools to improve learning. The atmosphere was festive and collaborative. My students shared information with some Dover students about blogging and went to see what projects and uses were being celebrated.

The Delaware Center for Technology hosted this event as part of their annual conference. Wendy Modzelewski and Wayne Hartschuh have their finger on the pulse of what’s hot in technology and bring speakers and vendors to the Dover conference every year. This is an excellent opportunity for the state teachers to network and keep up with the newest and the best that technology has to offer. Inviting and celebrating student achievement is a brilliant way to get the word out that Delaware students are at the core of the technology initiative!

This year the featured a guest speaker was Will Richardson. He wrote the book Wikis, Blogs and Podcasts which really helped me move farther along the path toward increased used of technology in my classroom. I spoke to him to describe just how enthusiastic my students were about using blogs and wikis everyday that they had taken over the management/ownership. I now step back and monitor progress in my own classroom!

Richardson told me that he liked to hear stories like this and posted some comments and our business card containing our web addresses on his blog. You can view and comment at

http://weblogg-ed.com/2007/business-cards-we-love-to-see/

Then, Pat Sine, my University of Delaware technology teacher, wrote about the good stuff that was happening in Milton on her blog. You can view and comment at

http://blogs.oet.udel.edu/sine/

As if that is not enough, you can view some additional comments on my blog at

http://dalbanese.edublogs.org/

Still don’t know what a wiki is? Don’t worry. It’s OK not to know what a wiki is but it won’t be that way for very long. You will need a wiki, you will want to use a wiki and you may find it useful to be able to make your own wiki.

Does the name Wikipedia mean anything to you? If I said, go look it up on Wikipedia, would you be able to figure out what I’m talking about?

~ by Diane Albanese on May 1, 2007.