Technology Advice from Troy Hicks

With the advance of technology, one of the most exciting aspects for me is that it is easier to get in contact with authors and other teachers to share ideas. I most enjoy books where the author writes in a conversational tone as if they are talking with their colleagues. These authors feel like mentors because of their tone.

As I have been experimenting with technology more than ever and plan to have technology and literacy be the emphasis of my doctoral research, Troy Hicks, author of The Digital Writing Workshop is one of those authors that I consider a mentor. I recently emailed him for advice on the best platform to use in order to meet the goals of how I want to use technology in my classroom. I explained that I wanted to find something that would fit the following:
*Allow students to begin their own blogs in a private setting for free (Parents were more comfortable with their students starting out their personal blogs in an environment only open to our students and their families.)
*Have a threaded comments feature, especially for book club discussions, for free
*A platform where it is easy to upload audio files

The following is an excerpt of his response to me:

The tool that I choose for my own teaching is a wiki. In particular, I use Wikispaces almost exclusively and would suggest that you give it a try. Here are two that you might want to look at for my pre-service methods course as well as our writing project:

    * http://eng315.wikispaces.com

    * http://chippewariverwp.wikispaces.com

First, with the idea of threaded discussions, you can create pages on the wiki and use the "discussion" tab for students to begin threads. The way that Wikispaces threads the discussions is not quite the same as you are probably accustomed to in a blog or discussion forum, but I think that you and your students will adjust to it quickly. 

Second, with the idea of a blog, each student can create his or her own page and "post" new "blog" entries to it, either on the page itself or as links from that page to new pages. Again, like the discussion thread on the wiki, this is not as robust as a model as what you are used to with Edublogs or Blogger, but I think that you need to focus on the purpose of the writing here and not the tool. In this case, students can keep all of their own work centralized and you can have lists of students that link to their pages so as to keep things organized. Also, you can set up RSS for changes to wiki pages, so you can have some of the functionality of a blog in the sense that you can keep on top of the changes. 

Third, with the idea of podcasting, you can upload audio files to the Wikispace or, better yet (to save space) upload them on your school server and then link them. They then show up on the wiki page and you can play them from there or download them. It isn't as elegant as having a streaming service, although there may be solutions for that which I am not familiar with. Also, the nice thing about Wikispaces is that embedding widgets in pages is super easy, so if you do have other forms of multimedia that you want to use, it is simple enough to do. 

Finally, in terms of privacy, you can make a Wikispace completely private with their free K-12 hosting plan. You can make it so only members can see things on the wiki and make changes, and I think that you could set up accounts for parents if they were interested in seeing what was going on, too. 

So, I am a big wiki advocate; honestly, I don't know how I would teach writing without using a wiki. 

Up to this point I do not have any experience with wikis, but I am excited to experiment. After running into problems getting all my 6th and 7th graders set up with Google Accounts, which would have led to creating blogs on Blogger, because of the requirement to be thirteen, I decided to only have 8th graders blog with Blogger. Having a wiki seems like it will be a perfect solution to still infuse a higher level of technology in my 6th and 7th grade reading and writing workshop. It will also scaffold their abilities to eventually have their own blog as 8th graders. I am planning on familiarizing myself with wikis over the summer in order to incorporate it into my classroom next year.