Week 4 PBWORKS/WIKIS

(T- in TPACK) The idea of a WIKI Space for class is to have a collaborative space where class members could meet, exchange assignment, collaborate, and store files online. I've enjoyed as a teacher using PBWorks wiki as a quick and easy way to deliver content to students in my Spanish classes.  I created a class wiki to house all sorts of information including class syllabus, class schedules, contact information, class pacing, links to important sites, and then class content.   In recent years I’ve used it as platform for students in upper level classes of grammar and literature to create webpages, collaborate (lit circles), present work (slides, videos), submit work (essays, research papers), and build  social media projects (e.g. Facebook-like pages for Don Quijote characters). In order to edit a WiKI it is quite similar to editing and working on Google Docs and includes uploads for tables and for YouTube videos. Similar to our conversation last week with the Flip Classroom class, teachers can set up assignments in a wiki page with mini-lessons, essential questions, directions, hyperlinks, and downloadable documents.

Some of the affordances available via PB Works and WIKIS include creating a lesson that includes text, an image, or even a slideshow; deliver these along with instructions, questions and answers.  Teachers can also teach students how to edit their own pages and submit work. It does take time to set up student accounts, but it becomes after all the set up a time-saving and flexible way to prepare class activities, as long as all students had computer access as was the case at the high school that I thought at. There is an online manual for educators and I have always found the PBWorks support staff to be very friendly and respond quickly.  Through the years of using WIKIS and PBWorks students have gain essential digital literacy skills from the experience of working in the wiki environment of designing pages, formatting and organizing files, and submitting documents online.(C-TPACK)  As we cover a new units of information in class, we would add a page of class content that I would make students in charge of.   

So for example:
Learning Objective:  The student analyses literary and related text in target language.
Learning Outcomes:  Ability to develop and carry out research projects in Spanish, including term papers and biographical research.
Each student would be responsible for their own wiki space and be incharge of a particular literary piece as well as the author, this leads to ownership of that material by the students. Students would then become familiar with ways to add video, links, pictures, etc. and then would present this to the class. We would then discuss as a class the content that was presented by each student to make sure that all information is pertinent and correct and what should be added/changed/deleted, and what other suggestions could be implemented in order to improve and make the page better.
 The page is also a way to assess the assignment as we want to make the page useful to every student, parent, and teacher who came across the lesson on the internet.  Parents could access he page for class information and could instantly see what their students were working on in class. Students will have a place to go to see all work created and review each author and literary piece for the upcoming spring AP test.

(P-TPACK)Looking at the learning theories that were part of our discussion this week - PBworks allows teachers and students a medium in which to create a content rich Wiki, that increases ownership in the learning process and supports the theory of distributive learning as well as distributive cognition.   By creating pages within the Wikispace that can house all sorts of information Distributed learning is a generated by using PBWorks as a  multi-media method of instructional delivery that includes a mix of Web-based instruction.  The learning theory of distributed cognition is also created and fulfilled via this platform by a collection of individuals and artifacts and their relations to each other in a particular work practice.  The collection of artifacts in this case study is an example of the pages created by the Spanish Lit students that would be each students responsibility to manage and upload with the necessary information and research that covers the author and literary piece that they have been assigned.