PE4 Wikispaces

Greetings! For my Relevant and Innovative Learning Scenario (RILS), I've decided to take my Advanced Placement Biology class wiki to the next level. I will use Wikispaces as my platform. Wikispaces is an easy-to-use wiki builder. Users create their own sites, invite members to join, and then enjoy shared access to discussion board and pages. With special deals for educators and easy-to-set privacy options, it's a really great site for teachers to use with their students. In fact, I know many teachers who build their primary Web sites on Wikispaces. (I use iWeb for this purpose, because I like the design options better, but there's no denying the appealing simplicity of Wikispaces.)

Last year, I created three wikis on wikispaces--one for every course I was teaching at the time (multiple sections shared the same wiki). My hope was to have a class discussion board with regularly assigned posts. The idea really only took off, though, in my AP Biology class, where I required students to post class summaries on a rotating basis. Really, I was being selfish in this assignment; I had grown weary from emails students sent me after they were absent, asking me what they had missed in a 75-minute class period. I figured that the class summaries would solve this problem, as absent students would have a place to go before approaching me with more specific inquiries.

The class summary assignments were never popular among my students, however, and so they felt that the class discussion board was redundant. (I did, after all, already have a vibrant class homepage that I updated after every class.) I was ready to abandon the idea, until taking the Emergent Technologies In A Collaborative Culture course at Full Sail. This inspired me to open up the discussion board to ideas originated by the students. My hope is that, without having so many required posts, the board will become a more organic platform on which students can share their thoughts and questions about the class.

To that end, I've gotten to work updating the wiki's homepage (see image). Note that the discussion posts you see are remnants of my last attempt at a class discussion board. I will continue to work on the page and build the discussion board. Check back to see how the RILS turns out!