Technology Week 3

The Wiki informational links were very helpful. I found 2 videos on eduwiki.edu particularly helpful. The clips were examples of how to best utilize wikis for an advanced literacy class (Sharpe, ) using scaffolding and advanced student participation as the project unfolded.

Collaborative projects rooted in technology in the special education environment could be useful in the following situations.

Using reading and decoding skills as the educational focus, a project that helps students put words / sentences into context and further reading comprehension could be a video project.

Two groups of students would each have a project topic and random video clips that they can use to bring a written passage of text to life. The purpose is to work on written word interpretation, object, action, outcome written comprehension.

The other team will try to guess what the video is about (like pictionary). The richness of the discussion is where the small group learning should facilitate comprehension. The teachers questions then turn to sentence construction, what tools would be used to find answers to questions, etc.

At the end each student would contribute thoughts / reflections on what they learned regarding how to learn.

A more advanced group of students could work on creating a wiki for a science project. The students would individually complete the experiment in class. They would work as a team to create an educational write up of their experiment to share with other "scientists". One page could be on proper lab safety and materials needed. One of the results, the theory, etc.

This project covers many key literacy skills and also collaboration skills between the team. As they edit the wiki they will need to discuss, debate so that the wiki is supporting the same conclusion throughout the paper.

Certainly there are other ways that programs could be used in a inclusion setting but these would be less collaborative and used more as an educational device.

Reference

Richardson, W., Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classroo (Paperback) by Will Richardson Retrieved, June 14, 2011 from http://thwt.org/historywikis.html#wikiplatforms
http://www.amazon.com/