pdZone

This week at school, we were discussing how to help the children learn how to learn how to write adventure stories. I stumbled across this great lesson idea for hypertext “choose your own adventure” stories (from ReadWriteThink). As I read the lesson, I tried to think how best to allow the students to write their stories and create new pages for the different branches of their stories. The challenge – for me, anyway – is to do this with younger students.

I thought about how best to tackle it. With older students, I wouldn’t hesitate to have them create a series of interconnected web pages. I opened up my wiki – my own little brainstorming area – and began to jot down a few ideas. That’s when it hit me: a wiki! It would be so easy for the students to create the pages they needed for the different branches of their stories. With a little bit of tweaking, we could set the ACLs so that students could only edit their own pages. I realize that this is somewhat heretical in the world of wiki, but it also recognizes reality. I know that it is easy enough to undo changes that other students might make, but I don’t want to discourage any students from sharing their own stories when we are just starting out. The next step could involve some sort of shared authoring of a story.

The next question is: which wiki engine do we use? I have played a bit with Wikka, but it would be nice to have some sort of control (there’s that word!) over group permissions. WikiniMST offers convenient group management, but I don’t have the time to translate all of the text into English. I think we may go with MediaWiki in the end. I guess we’ll see how it goes. I’m excited by the thought of the experiment.

I love being a teacher!

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