(Original post date: Friday, November 30, 2007)

Okay, so the wiki assignments I set up for my students didn’t go exactly as I’d envisioned. I don’t know why I thought that anything would run smoothly when I added 100+ kids to the equation. In any case, the first “post the cool websites you find about this topic” assignment was a MESS for the first group of kids. Their subjects are things like, “Katelyn’s Sites!” All of this would be well and good except that they weren’t allowed to duplicate other kids’ sites, and keeping track of every posted site was impossible. Susequent classes posted their sites in the subject of their posts, which created a somewhat easier to handle list of sites, but it still left me searching for their responses to classmates’ sites. OY.

Part of the problem is that wikispaces is free and full of cool features, but it doesn’t give me the control I need… for instance, I need to be able to type in a kid’s username and see everything he/she has posted/edited. BlackBoard, I believe, has this function, but since my school doesn’t use it, that’s not an option for me.

In any case, my plan is to go MUCH simpler for the next wiki assignment… like: respond to this question and to one other student’s response. Again, this is me coming up with the assignments w/o actual teenagers mucking it all up. So, we’ll see.

Meanwhile, I’m still coveting all things technological. I don’t care how many people tell me the iPhone is overrated… it’s SO COOL and I want one. I don’t want to pay for it or for the necessary accompanying service, of course. And therein lies the problem. So it’s a no go for the iPhone. Likewise with the Macbook, which I may also have mentioned before. Oh, and now, thanks to my pal E., I am coveting PhotoShop. I want to put my head on Paris Hilton’s body. LOL

I wonder if E. is on MySpace…. I’m going to go check now.

Ciao