EDTE 350 History Wiki:About

This wiki was created for a project in my EDTE 350 class covering how a teacher would aid a class in confidently using a learning tool to analyze and synthesize data on their own. Students would work as groups to create pages in this wiki under the topics they were learning about in their fourth grade class.

Overview of lesson

The teacher brings the class together and asks about the events and people they’ve been learning about. The teacher helps the students to create a concept map of the people and events they’ve learned about, separating them into categories like hearing and deaf history, events and people, different timeframes, etc. The teacher will help students separate into groups, and the teacher will prompt the students to choose an event and a person to research. (Potential topics: World War I, William Willard, Jonathan Jennings, Indiana School for the Deaf, women's suffrage, etc.)

The teacher will introduce the wiki and explain how it works (i.e. basic markup) and that the students will be working to create pages in this wiki. The teacher will then lead a discussion of the different ways they can research (possible avenues: internet, library, Deaf History Museum, interviews) and help students formulate their plans for researching the topic (i.e. what to look for in the library, who to interview) and how to write the article (who will be in charge of what part, who might do different parts of a signed video, etc.).

The student groups then work largely independently on this project in conjunction with the rest of the unit, checking in with the teacher occasionally to show their progress. Students will create pages for topics in each era of history they begin to learn about, as well as an ASL signed version of the page (much like the “Spoken Wikipedia” project on Wikipedia). Other students can view these pages to learn about the topics they did not write about, as well as to provide edits themselves, if needed and appropriate.