Google Docs vs. Wikis

I thought I would start off by giving a little bit of my background. In 2008, I was chosen to attend the Google Teachers Academy in Chicago which was also the first year of Google Apps in Prince George's County. I have enjoyed being a Google Certified Teacher so much I went ahead and went through the process of becoming a Google Apps EDU Certified Trainer. The reason for mentioning all of this is that I LOVE Google Apps and there may be a little non-biased opinions in this entry.

Google Docs have all of the best qualities of wikis. You can collaborate on any Google Docs, just like wikis, by sharing. Not everything you work on you want to make into a web site and Google Docs solves that problem.

Unlike wikis, Google Docs has more options when it comes to privacy settings. A Doc can be private, shared with a few, or published on the web. Through each of those options there are view, edit, or own options to grant the new users. The best part is that all of the options can be changed within seconds. This makes true collaboration a lot easier than wikis.

Now for a real life example... Our school is working on new professional development models for next year. The administration and I shared a Google Form to create a survey on the comfort level of teachers in different areas: co-teaching, technology, Webb's Depth of Knowledge, etc. At first I created all of the questions in private mode. When I was done, I gave editing rights to the administration in case they wanted to add or modify questions. After changes, I used the public link to share with staff so they could take the survey, but not view the results. Results are instant and Google has a nice summary of responses feature. All of this will be applied to our school improvement plan. This whole process was a lot faster than the traditional paper method.

Using Google Docs in the classroom is a little trickier since students don't have access to Google Docs yet (fingers crossed for the Fall middle school roll out). There is an option where any one with the link to the Google Doc can edit, but this has issues. You cannot track revisions back to individual students, so docs can be sabotaged (Revision History is wonderful in these situations). It also makes it hard to use other features like discussions and comments. I do use Google Docs as a storage area for students to upload projects they are working on. I set up an account for each grade level and change the passwords between assignments as a work around to the system. Setting up collections makes grading and archiving student work a breeze.

Did I mention I LOVE Google Apps?

Building DIY Tech

Probably one of the hardest steps in creating this wiki was choosing a topic. Since the school year has come to a close, it didn't make sense to build a student projects site. In all of my classes I like to build assignments I can use later, so I decided to build a professional development site for teachers. My hope is that this site will appeal to educators that embrace technology and don't require face-to-face time with an instructor. I like the idea of a wiki for this because it becomes more interactive with teachers posting examples, questions, and tips.

I have used Wikispaces in the past and it was good to see that it is still an easy process. It only took a couple of minutes to have the wiki up and running. Of course I had to start looking at how to customize the look of the wiki. There is a number of themes and even more if the site is an approved K12 site. Adding a new logo was very easy.

The hardest part I had to deal with was the navigation widget. In other wikis I created, when I created a new page it automatically showed up in the navigation sidebar. This layout did not do that so I had to edit the navigation widget.

To make sure that it was still simple to embed work from other sources, I decided to create the intro to the site in Google Docs. The experiment worked! Just like in the past, I chose the "other" option to paste in the presentation embed code. In a couple of seconds the Google Doc was on the wiki and running very well.

I look forward to continuing to work on this wiki and see what it becomes.

Wild About Wikis

Wikis are wonderful for the classroom! They are a simple and safe way for students to publish their work on the web. Since students are not supposed to sign up for accounts, most educational versions of wikis allow the teacher to set up accounts for the students without an email address. This makes the process so much easier. At the same time this makes wikis the type of project that requires more teacher planning than other types of web 2.0 projects.

Another great aspect about Wikis is that students can feel successful without having any previous experience with web site creation. The format is very simple to add text and images. It is super easy to embed videos, glogs, and anything else that has an embed code. I like to take this time to explain basic html code and how to customize embed codes.

The one slightly negative aspect is when students edit the wrong area. Usually I set up all the pages and assign them to students, but there is always someone that will edit the home page because it is the first one they see. The revision history option is perfect to avoid student meltdowns when they think their work is lost.

I thought I would share some of my wiki projects that I have used in the past. When I first created a wiki project, students had to create a virtual zoo. In teams, they created pages that detailed one animal. Some of the requirements included informational text, images with citations, and videos if possible.

Another wiki was Summer recommendations. Students had to suggest places to visit over the summer. The classes loved this project because they felt like travel experts.

My favorite wiki project was called, “Brand of Me.” 8th grade students worked on creating a personal brand using various web 2.0 tools. The wiki allowed the student to put all of their creations in one area along with reflections on the process.

You have some great ideas. This is all so new to me and I am feeling a little overwhelmed. It is comforting to know thst it can be done.

Great Job!

Thanks for getting your blog setup and ready to go!

Linda