What a Wonderful Wiki!!

Wiki's are the best thing since sliced bread! They can be used as collaborative tools for teachers and students. As a first year Library Media Technology Specialist, I'm learning that finding time to actually sit down and brainstorm with educators is nearly impossible. With all the meetings, evaluations and professional development training, teachers just cant make it down to the media center to chat it up. On the other hand, I'm busy juggling multiple things at once; from checking books in & out, locating materials, assisting students with their researching needs and answering not one....not two....but THREE phones, I just don't have the time to pop a squat either. So what can you do in this situation?

CREATE A WIKISPACE, THAT'S WHAT!! 

In my opinion, using a wiki in the media center would be a great idea. I could create a space that would be totally dedicated to the happenings in the media center, have a platform for advertising newly acquired books and/or technology, post links to reliable sources for group assignments and projects, upload videos of book talks for students, and also set up meeting spaces for teachers to ask questions or provide suggestions. One drawback that I have with wiki's is the design process. OMG, to get a picture in a certain spot is maddening!!!! I'm so particular about how things look on a website and if I can't have my product 100% it would drive me bananas. Another drawback is having multiple administrators with editing rights. Last semester, I took a course that required groups to create a wikispace. At times, it was a little difficult because things would get changed or moved around.

Apalachee High School Media Center's Wiki (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7004.pdf)

Overall, I thought that Apalachee High School Media Center's wikispace was very well organized. Organization is imperative when creating any type of website. Things that I envisioned including on my wikispace was there. I liked everything about the site; however, the Learn, Read and Research links were the moist important, in my opinion. The Learn link led me to more links to lots of information, such as, collaborative projects & tools, resources by department,and each subject covered at the school (i.e. CTAE, Fine Arts, Language Arts, etc.) I didn't like that there were links to pages that didn't have any information on it. To me, that's a waste; why not list the subject and then make it live once you have information to post. Clicking on empty links, is time consuming and can become a nuisance, especially when you're looking for a particular thing. The Read link provided little blogs about what people were reading at that time and even suggested a few books with summaries that avid readers may want to check out. The problem I had with this is that it hadn't been updated in awhile. The last posts were in 2008. If you're going to have a space of this magnitude, it would be ideal to keep it updated regularly. Hopefully, I'll be able to create something like this in the future.

Library Success (http://www.libsuccess.org/)

Library Success is a wikispace that media specialists, librarians, or library volunteers may connect in a central location to collaborate on the successes and failures of using wiki's in the library. This page had so much information and I was definitely excited to explore. I was disappointed that a lot of the links, such as the "Community Portal", "Current Events", and "Help", weren't available. They had all been deleted. This all comes back to the accuracy/validity of the site. I went to view the members of the wiki and tried to click on their names to learn more about their background. There were a lot of members that hadn't been registered,or didn't have any information on the page. The more and more I poked around the site, the more I realized that there wasn't much info to access. There are plenty of links with useless information. The sites haven't been updated in years for goodness sake! Technology changes so fast and it's important to keep things up to date. You certainly don't want to distribute the wrong info.

Elements Needed to Promote Healthy, ACTIVE, Collaborative Spaces

In order for a wiki to be a successful place of collaboration, it's creator would need three things:

• People, 
• Meaningful information, and
• Accuracy/Validity. 

Without people, there wouldn't be any life to the space.  The creator must also ensure that he/or she is providing meaningful information to the people. A consistent downfall that I witnessed after my explorations of Apalachee High School Media Center's Wiki and Library Success,
was lack of accuracy/validity. It's essential that if you decide to create a space, that you keep it as up to date as possible, even more so, as a Library Media Technology Specialist/Media Specialist/Librarian. You have to make sure that you are providing the most reliable material to your patrons.

Signing off for now :)

~Chasady

MEDT 7477 Spring 2015 Blog 1 Wikis B. Leverette Team 7

Bridget Leverette Team 7 Blog 1
After reading the assigned articles about Wikis and doing some extra research, I noticed that the teachers at my elementary school as well as myself could really benefit from using blogs in their classroom and in the media center.  My mind immediately thought of ways that teachers and I could benefit from using wikis.  Once a month I meet with each grade level to find out which standards they will be covering for the upcoming weeks and I create media lessons for the students when they come to visit the media center. I can incorporate wikis into my lessons by creating opportunities for the students to participate in a virtual field trip. Our second grade students are studying the Lewis and Clarks expedition.  A great way to get the students engaged in learning about the places they studied is to have students research all the places and get them to share images and information about the location. Our fifth grade students are currently learning about the key people of the World War II era. The students could create a presentation on a wiki to display what they have learned about each person.  In order to promote a love for reading I would have some students to write a wiki book.  The students would share their favorite books from their past grade levels on a wiki with a short typed review next to a picture of the book jacket.  Each of the classes wiki books would be displayed in the Media Center for students who would like to get a school mates advice on good books to read.  These ways  to use wikis in the media center can easily be used in the classroom.  Teachers can also use wikis to get students to create a glossary of terms they use and learn about in new units adding definitions and images. 
There are some great advantages to incorporating wikis into an instructional activity.  There is lots of free wiki software that is easy to create accounts for students and teachers.  The students do not have to have a lot of technology skills in order to create a wiki.  Wikis promote creativity that goes beyond a plain text essay, they can include lots of multimedia.  Each student group can have access to the wiki page to work on it.
The drawbacks are that teachers could get discouraged because set up can be time consuming initially.  It could be overwhelming for teachers to grade if there are too many entries. Plagiarism and copyright issues could arise if students and teachers don't site everything that is written.
In order for teachers to move towards actively using wikis for collaboration I think they will need time to plan and create the wiki.  It would be a good idea to pre-create a template of the elements to make up the wiki.  The teachers could then just plug in their information and use the template as a guide to write down their ideas from start to finish.