(copied from notes made during November of 2009)
Problem: Strengthening the home/school connection to provide support for student learners
Question: Can wikis be used to strengthen the connection between home and school in support of student learners?
Idea: Initiate a class wiki as a tool for communicating between the classroom and home.
Students are the predominant authors of the information within the class wiki and update the content regularly to keep parents informed about what they are learning in our classroom.
I have met this goal through the successful launch of our class wiki. Students beg to be chosen to update the content each week and parents are pleased with the connection between the classroom and home. In an effort to encourage parents to check out our wiki and learn to navigate through the pages I also sent home a guided questionnaire for them to use as their child showed them around the tool. There was a place for parent reactions and suggestions that has been informative for my efforts in making this site as useful as possible as well. Overall, this initiative has been effective already and I predict that it will continue to help bridge the home/school connection throughout the remainder of the year (as well as motivate students to create content to be shared).
Link to our class wikiI have used a parent-student questionnaire to help me to evaluate our class wiki. This survey includes questions that guide parents through the different pages of our class wiki and provides a scaffold for interacting with the content with help from their children. Suggestions are also given as well as general reactions. The following comments were received through this questionnaire…
“I liked that there was student work on there. I wish there had been more writing on there. I enjoyed reading them (the student stories).”
“It enables parents and children to share school information.”
“I think the wiki is great. Very well organized and a good bit of info. Great job!”
“Very helpful when looking to see what the class/grade is doing.”
“I loved it! I loved reading all the stories.”
“This is a great way for students to help each other while each is at home doing homework, etc.”
“Very useful tool. Animal inquiry domain site down on wiki page.”
“I think this is an awesome idea, and is a great way to keep you in touch with the activities/work in the classroom.”
“It is amazing…so informative! I am impressed, Mrs. Lowder!”
“I really like the wiki page. It gives us insight as to what’s going on in class. I give it a thumbs up!”
“That it lets us know what the children are learning in class.”
“We can see what the children are doing in class. Suggestion: Do no use yellow print on a white background, we could not read the animals some of the children picked.”
“I like being able to see at any given time what my child is doing in class in all subject areas.”
“Everybody shares their work and opinions.”
“This is awesome. I love the way this wiki is set up-I enjoyed looking at it with Brittany and it is great for her to see her own work there.” –“Dear Mrs. Lowder, I love our class wiki!!! Brittany”
“I enjoyed using it. The layout was good and it was very easy to navigate through the pages. The only problem was not being able to access the customized search engine. May suggest some graphics on the pages to spice them up some more.”
In reflection, I have followed the suggestions from parents concerning the updating of the customized search engine link, the text color/background on the related page, and have made time for students to add more of their stories. In have not yet added graphics but am looking more into copyright practices and acceptable graphics that I may be able to add. Overall, the wiki is already proving to be a powerful tool that is getting parents more involved in their child’s learning. It is also motivating students to produce high quality work in hopes that they will be able to add it to our wiki for their peers and parents to see. In the future, I will take more time to check to be sure that all links are working before publishing for parents to see. The customized search engine link on our wiki was not linked properly and would not work. Most students remembered using this from our class web page the previous week so they used this to complete this question on the questionnaire but parents were not aware of this.
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