Andrea+Carpenter

Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that you can add to and my students LOVE to use it to research everything!! But they aren't allowed to.

Wikispaces Review Andrea Carpenter First of all, I enjoyed working with my group very much. Especially to have been put together in such a random way. I feel like we were very confused at the beginning of assignment. It was unclear to us as a group and to me personally, exactly what we were supposed to do, and that never really changed. After we figured out that we were just going to get started and see what happened, we really got on a roll. I did get frustrated about how ambiguous some of the parts of the rubric were. Should we have 40 discussion posts as a group or as individuals? Does everything you do count or does it all have to be in the discussion page? Exactly what is considered to be “above and beyond” for enhancements? And why are enhancements so important? None of this was covered in the beginning, and when we started asking questions there were no conclusive answers.

Our group decided that each of us would make a character for our ‘case study’ and describe a certain trait or characteristic that would make a difficult fit into a regular education classroom. For part two, we all got our ‘problem children’ under control, except for the child with Autism. That is where we put our focus for the last part of the assignment. We tried to find several links, pictures and videos to enhance our text and make an interesting project. I still am not sure what knowlege I was supposed to gain from making a story on Wikispaces.

I can say that I enjoyed the collaboration, and I can see how this type of project could be useful. However, I wish there could have been more clarification as to how this benefits our educational experience. It almost felt like making up a story and then answering our own questions about it, with little feedback during the process. I understand that Wikispaces can be a useful tool for some situations, but I do not consider it to be a scholarly tool.