Deborah Marshall is a teacher-librarian at Ballarat High School. She has developed an excellent
wiki in conjunction with classroom teacher Samantha Gooding. Deborah and Samantha both attended the SLAV conference early this year which featured Will Richardson. Deborah says, ‘We were inspired enough by him that we wanted to put his ideas into action. In Term 2 our Library team completed the SLAV Web 2.0 training (which was great!) and this gave me the added confidence to dive in and have a go.’
Homepage
She continues, ‘I initiated the wiki and invited the classroom teacher in as a co-administrator – and as a collaborative tool it has been wonderful. We can both add to the wiki without having to physically be together – but the history page allows us to keep track of developments. Given that the wiki was to be based on a brand new unit of work, Graphic novels, we felt the wiki would be a useful way of tracking our progress.’
Lesson plans
Deborah explains how she and Samantha have ‘spread the word’. ‘Recently we presented the wiki at an English Learning Area meeting to demonstrate the possibilities for our colleagues – this was our first “marketing” effort.’
Graphic novel summary
Deborah describes the process, ‘As this was a first effort with a wiki neither the teacher nor I were overly adventurous: we decided to start with a wiki that we could control and that was meant more for staff than students – a curriculum record, in a sense. Our aim was then to invite other teaching staff along so they could add to the wiki if they wished (eg. the Year 9 teachers and the English Learning Area teachers – as both these groups could make use of this wiki in the future). We hope that this presentation will encourage wiki use by other English teachers in the school. It is certainly something that my Library colleagues and I hope to pursue.’
Mind map assessment
Deborah explains, ‘Our Library team will be presenting to the whole staff next Term on our Web 2.0 training, as we were a Professional Learning Team for this activity and all PLTs at school are presenting their learnings to our colleagues. We have decided to create a wiki for this presentation and this wiki will have links to our Graphic novel wiki and Library blogs etc. We are hoping that this presentation and wiki will encourage other teaching staff to come on board with the Library next year and create more wikis for curriculum development and resourcing. Some of our other Library team members are beginning to create wikis for this purpose.
Mind map rubric
Thank you to Deborah and Samantha for their terrific work, for sharing their learning with us and with their staff. Well done.
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The mind map rubric is actually very well done. It can be used as it is in for developing project presentations.