Thing 17

Blogs are much different than wikis.  To me, a blog is like a journal.  They typically convey the thoughts or opinions of the author.  Only the author has access to a blog and it doesn't invite much interaction from others.  A wiki, however, is a platform that many people can post on.  It allows for collaboration on ideas from many different people.  It is almost like writing in real time because they support topics for discussion with other people.  Plus, why have a blog when a wiki can support a blog.  A wiki seems to be about creation and discussion whereas a blog is about expressing your thoughts. 

I think that I would almost always prefer to use a wiki rather than a blog.  A wiki is a great tool to develop a classroom page.  Each student can contribute their own ideas to the topic and I think that they would be much more engaged adding things to a wiki than a blog.  Just as I did in my example, I would love to develop class wikis based on the novels that we read.  I could divide students into groups where they find different resources like videos, pictures, audio clips, websites, character descriptions, or related information to the time period and setting of the story.  Or I could set a number of posts students have to contribute that way they can decide for themselves what they are interested in.  Especially with my ninth grade students, getting them to be engaged in the literature we read is difficult.  Students are to wrapped up in their own world and times of today that they often miss out on the great aspects of the work. 

Some problems that I can envision with using a wiki is monitoring student postings.  I would be afraid that a student might post something and remove it before I get a chance to see it.  Even with strict rules, ninth graders think that they are so funny and like to be known as the class clown.  Also, I would worry that students would just try to copy off of one another with their posts.  They like to do the least amount of work as possible.  I wonder if students would have limited access to the wiki.  Not every student has a computer and library space is limited.  Honestly, once I go home being able to monitor the student's postings would be a difficult task for me.  It would be nice to create one that we could periodically use throughout the year, but I would have to think on what that would be.