Sight Seen-Me Teaching

Today I taught four junior-senior classes how to use our Wiki tool within Blackboard.

They were bored after 5 minutes...even though the presentation took about 15. Not bored with me, but they got it...at least I think that's what it was.

The interesting part...

They know about Wikipedia but they don't know that it is a wiki. Only 5-6 kids could out of four classes could tell me what a wiki was.

They didn't know how easy Wikipedia was to edit-I jumped on the school page and added some things, which they found interesting.

I showed them the pornographic spam that's on Jakeswiki (relax, its just links and I didn't click on any) to show them how wikis get vandalized. I also used this as a reason why we do our wiki work within Blackboard, among several other reasons.

I gave a student the opportunity to come up and add pages and content in each class, which they did easily.

The upshot, which will not surprise you: they didn't know about the tool, but had the affinity to rapidly assimilate it, and now 110 more kids know what a wiki is and how it can be used.