Our wiki page reflections

We are in Canterbury at the Pilgrims Summer School doing an ICT course with our trainer Kristina and a group of fellow students, who come from Slovakia (3), Hungary (1), Poland (3), Slovenia (1) North Cyprus (2) and the Netherlands (1) so we are a rather mixed group, but we get along very well, helping each other whenever we can.

 

Our names are Gitka Kottmanova and Margaretha Siebelt (short Marga). At the back of the picture you can see our friends on the course Nihat and Alan.

 

Our task was to create a page on our class Wiki and introduce the job of a farmer in Ancient Egypt. This page should provide information to young students with also some sort of tasks. It should persuade a young person to become the apprentice of a farmer, rather than another job. Have a look at the task on the wiki and you will understand the following steps we try to describe.  

 
We are going to outline are the steps we took when creating a Wiki and the different kind of media tools we used. Moreover we tried to indicate the difficulties we encountered while making it and the questions still to be answered.

  

Planning and finding materials:

●    We started by creating a Google drive document because we wanted to work on it simultaneously. We used pictures from various sources using insert image.

●    During the course Kristina taught us the advantages of working in a Google doc, which you can find under the heading of Google drive, do have a look!!!!!

Here are three sites with some ideas for using a Google Doc with students: https://sites.google.com/site/colettecassinelli/docs,

http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume14/ej55/ej55m1/

http://www.edudemic.com/2012/04/50-little-known-ways-google-docs-can-help-in-education/)

●    The great thing about working together in a Google doc is that you can see whatever the other person is adding even when you are miles away, even when you are continents apart. It is also possible to revert back to an earlier version if someone makes a mistake or accidentally deletes something.

●    We started a search on the internet and used the following websites:

○     a webquest based on this task

○     Google search to get pictures by using advanced search

We searched inside one website ‘ancientegypt.co.uk’ (which you can do from Google Advanced Search) using the tags ‘farmer’ and ‘agriculture’.

The results were reliable because the ‘ancientegypt.co.uk’ is a British Museum website. They were useful, because they give us the basic information we needed. The criteria for selecting them, was our audience (young students) so the language should not be too difficult.

Preparing the wiki page:

●    We had realised there were 4 different aspects of being a farmer so we created a table of 2 x 2 on our PBworks wiki page because you can easily organise the layout of the text, images, video or whatever else you are going to add within a table. In every one of the squares we introduced a different category of information using a picture that linked to a video, a PowerPoint presentation, our Google document or a website with a story game.  In short, 4 sections and for consistency each one links to different media.

●    Linking from the picture on the wiki page to the Google document is a bit tricky. We had to pay great attention to the way the link is organised, the document has to be embedded into the table by using the following steps: http://tinyurl.com/npd6gp4   By the way, the use of this tinyurl.com site is great, because so many times you try to give a person a link and by mistyping things go completely wrong, but by shortening it, life becomes much easier.

Inserting the pictures into the table

The inserting of pictures into the table is not so difficult.

●    We collected the pictures and put them in a folder on the desktop

●    We inserted the pictures into the table. Look at the following pdf document for all the steps neatly explained.

●    We introduced a short video on the YouTube and introduced it into the table by insert video also explained in the above site. We used a YouTube video, because our students are very visually inclined and will be willing to learn from the video.

●    The last picture links to a site with an educational character. It’s an interactive story about a boy in search of his brother on the Nile. You can make the boy go up and downstream while the story tells something about what he encounters. Finally he will find his brother if..... you go into the right direction. 

Overall:

We choose the 4 images from the same website with each part something to click on to go further into the description of the life of the farmer or his environment, in order to maintain a consistent image. We are happy with the way the page looks.

  

The presentation:

We presented the result to our group and they were so kind as to give us the following feedback.

The positive points were the following

 

1. The setup was logical, nice and strong



2. Children will like the story and they can easily remember it



3. The content, searching, design and use of media was considered to be well done



4. Kristina was pleased that we worked with our goal group in mind the young adolescents. (primary and upper primary students)

 

There were some negative critical notes meant to be instructive, much appreciated.

1. less text would be nice, it is not clear what is important and less important



2. a PowerPoint with special effects was missing

 

In future we will certainly implement both the positive and the negative remarks.

We greatly enjoyed making the blog and for class purposes we are going to introduce it too.

17-6-2013

Gitka and Marga