The Tempered Radical

Part 1: Using Digital Tools to Support PLCs

You know, I’m not sure that PLC advocates and supporters realize just how difficult collaboration really is for classroom teachers. 

It’s not that we don’t want to work together to ensure the success of our students.  Our hearts have almost always been in the right places. The hitch is that collaborative work requires a measure of coordination that can be downright frustrating for teachers on novice learning teams. 

Over the past six years, my own learning team has had to learn how to coordinate the following actions:

• The development of common assessments.
• The development of shared sets of essential outcomes.
• The publication of shared sets of lessons and materials.
• The organization of team-based collections of web sources.
• The organization of team-based websites for communicating with parents and other interested parties.
• The development of team-based approaches and philosophies about key issues like remediation, enrichment, grading and homework.

While managing team-based resource collections, engaging in meaningful conversations, and collaborating on shared documents are all essential practices for PLCs, they require time and energy that most teachers and teams just don’t have.  Making matters worse is the common perception on the part of school leaders that PLCs are a cheap-and-easy reform strategy that carry no costs!

Organizational theorists—including Clay Shirky, one of my favorite thinkers—recognize that the time, attention and energy that teams invest in coordinating their work ARE costs of doing business.

For many learning teams, these “transaction costs” can be crippling.

Teachers quickly decide whether or not coordination is worthwhile—and if the time and energy necessary to coordinate team efforts don’t outweigh the perceived benefits of collaborative work, commitment to shared learning dies, plain and simple.

Whether we like it or not, teachers on teams have to believe that collaborative work is worthwhile before they’re going to be willing to move forward together. As much as we like to think that teachers would do anything for our students, “whatever it takes” is quickly replaced by “what’s in it for me” in the minds of already overworked teachers.

The good news—and a lesson that I try to share with every learning team that I work with—is that digital tools can help to reduce the transaction costs associated with collaboration and coordination.

New Slide: School's Epic Data Fail

I wanted to be a bit visually creative today, so I put a slide together to go with my Your Data Dream, My Data Nightmare post.  Hope you enjoy it:

Download Slide_DataFailure

National Poetry Month Materials

So my digital friends Bud Hunt and Kevin Hodgson have created a bit of a monster.  In honor of National Poetry Month, Bud is posting images on his blog every day to spark the poetic fire in each of his readers and Kevin is writing some amazing bits in response to every image.  

I stopped by one day just figuring to give the project a look and ended up getting hooked, writing more poetry in two weeks than I've probably written my entire life.  I also find myself driving around town revising poetry in my mind, and most nights, I can't fall asleep because I'm looking for just the right word to add to the next day's poem.  

And I'm having fun!

Download NPM 1

So how's this help you? 

I've also started creating poetry materials to use with my students when we track back in to school at the end of April.  While National Poetry Month will officially be over, I figure I'll try to hook my kids the way that I've been hooked. 

Not only am I planning to create a bunch more Express Your SELF slides like the one above to advertise, I'm in the middle of a series of lessons that I can use to help my students explore, write and record their own poetry. 

Here are the first two lessons in the series:

Download Handout_CharacteristicsofMemorablePoems

Download Handout_WritingMemorablePoems

Hope that some of you can use them---and that you'll start stopping by Bud's blog to write with us before the end of the month!

Creative expression is an outlet, y'all. 

Using Spreadsheets and Pivot Tables to Track Data. . .

So I've decided to give the Radical Nation their Christmas present a bit early this year---and it's a home-made gem that you might just find to be your favorite gift under the tree.  Here it is:

Download Sample_Spreadsheet

Now, I know what you're thinking:  "This guy is giving us an Excel spreadsheet for Christmas and he wants us to be happy about it?  Why didn't he just bust out a few hundred digital fruitcakes?"

Before you jump to any conclusions about the worthiness--or worthlessness---of my offering, though, be sure to give this spreadsheet a good once over.  What you'll find is that it's a pretty complex little data management document that you might just be able to take real advantage of.  I know my colleagues are pretty jazzed about the whole thing.  In fact, it's the first holiday gift that I ever truly made them happy with.

Here's how it works:  On our learning team, we were looking for a way to track individual student performance at the reading skill level.  That means we wanted to be able to quickly identify the students that we serve who struggled with author's purpose or main idea questions.  We wanted to know who needed extra help with summarizing or vocabulary.  And we wanted sorting these students to be easy.

Education, Technology and Obama's Imagination. . .

So in the interest of full disclosure, I should probably start by saying that I'm a bit of a left-leaner when it comes to politics. 

Working in classrooms for over a decade gives you a real sense for the disparity between the haves and have-nots in our country---and you tend to want to find ways to stick up for the little guy. In that sense, I've been Obama-fied over the last year.

His recent comments on technology in education---spotlighted in this eSchool News article---have left me nothing short of gobsmacked, though!  Here's the entire quote:

"Imagine a future where our children are more motivated because they aren't just learning on blackboards, but on new whiteboards with digital touch screens; where every student in a classroom has a laptop at [his or her] desk; where [students] don't just do book reports but design PowerPoint presentations; where they don't just write papers, but they build web sites; where research isn't done just by taking a book out of the library, but by eMailing experts in the field; and where teachers are less a source of knowledge than a coach for how best to use it and obtain knowledge. By fostering innovation, we can help make sure every school in America is a school of the future.

"And that's what we're going to do when I'm president. We will help schools integrate technology into their curriculum, so we can make sure public school students are fluent in the digital language of the 21st-century economy. We'll teach our students not only math and science, but teamwork and critical thinking and communication skills, because that's how we'll make sure they're prepared for today's workplace."

Let's tackle a few bits of Obama's imagination one at a time:

"Imagine a future where our children are more motivated because they aren't just learning on blackboards, but on new whiteboards with digital touch screens; where every student in a classroom has a laptop at [his or her] desk;

This one almost cost Obama my vote in and of itself!  You see, he's making the same mistake that nearly every decision-maker in the past ten years has made when talking about educational technology:  He's believing that nifty tools are needed to increase student motivation.

I used to be a nifty-tools guy, too.  Ask my friend Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach.  I'd drive her crazy with my commitment to gadgets. 

Then I started paying pretty careful attention to the kinds of work being done in the loaded classroom (think cheese fries), and what I found was shocking:  Rooms kitted out with thousands and thousands of dollars of technology are often no different than the nun-and-ruler-driven classrooms of old.  Dropping technology into a classroom rarely changes instruction in meaningful ways.   

Whiteboards are easily the best example because those digital touch screens that Obama is dreaming of are rarely even touched by students in most loaded classrooms!  Instead, they become a new-and-improved way for teachers to do what they've always done:  Drone from the board in a one-way broadcast model of classroom instruction. 

Are we really reforming education by introducing teachers to electronic chalk?

The Senator drove the knife even deeper with this one:

where [students] don't just do book reports but design PowerPoint presentations; where they don't just write papers, but they build web sites; where research isn't done just by taking a book out of the library, but by eMailing experts in the field;

Tell me that we aren't really going to argue that PowerPoint and email are innovations? 

That's got to be a joke, right?

Ask any kid today what they think of PowerPoint and they'll tell you they're completely fed up with it.  Again, does it really change instruction---or is it just another fancy tool for teachers to deliver notes to kids?  Maybe it's a nice replacement for color Vis a Vis overhead projector pens, but it ain't much beyond that!

And Barack----you've got kids, right? 

Do they email anyone? 

Chances are they don't! 

Today's generation instant messages and texts.  They Skype and video-chat.  Synchronous communication defines the work that they do with peers away from school.  Why should we believe they're actually going to sit and wait for days for a reply from an expert when they're used to getting answers NOW?  Email might feel good to most of us---at least everyone outside of Senator McCain---but it's nearly pointless to our students.

Now, Obama gets a bit closer to the kinds of conversations we should be having when he wrote:

and where teachers are less a source of knowledge than a coach for how best to use it and obtain knowledge. By fostering innovation, we can help make sure every school in America is a school of the future...

We'll teach our students not only math and science, but teamwork and critical thinking and communication skills, because that's how we'll make sure they're prepared for today's workplace."

We really do need to foster innovation in our classrooms and to redefine teachers as knowledge coaches.  After all, the majority of today's students have figured out that school actually hinders their ability to learn.  With a couple of mouse clicks, they can stumble upon information for any topic that they're interested in mastering---and chances are, that content will be far more varied and aligned with different learning styles than what they get in most classrooms.

Showing students how to access and manage this information is nothing short of an essential first step towards developing the oft-cliched "life-long learners" that we profess constant commitment to. 

Teamwork, critical thinking and communication are EXACTLY the kinds of skills that we need to emphasize in order to prepare children for the workplaces of tomorrow.  Read Daniel Pink's Whole New Mind someday.  He makes a pretty good case for the fact that we live in a world where design and innovation are becoming the "new normal." 

The functionality epitomized by the right-brained generation of the '70s and '80s is a basic expectation today...businesses need creativity to excel, and the most successful workers in this new economy will be those who can cross boundaries between topics----making connections and innovations that join seemingly diverse fields.

But my question, Senator Obama, is simple:  How can you honestly expect this kind of creative thinking to define classrooms when the sole indicators of success are multiple choice tests in reading and mathematics?

I've written pretty extensively about what standardized tests have done to my classroom.  Every year, team work, critical thinking and communication are pushed out of my lessons---replaced by multiple choice quizzes and questions that are designed to prepare my kids for the end of grade exams. 

If you're serious about making the kinds of skills that you describe as essential for preparing kids for tomorrow's workplace an important part of today's classrooms, you'd better start talking about ditching accountability systems that place no emphasis on anything other than Scantron bubble sheets when measuring "results," because instruction will never change until you do.

As unfortunate as it may seem, what's tested is definitely what's taught.

Now, maybe I'm being a bit unfair here---after all, I'm drawing conclusions about Senator Obama's entire educational platform from a two-paragraph quote in an article I stumbled across in my feed reader the other day.  I'm also smart enough to recognize that the president, Congress and the Department of Education have far less control over school decisions than policy makers at the state level.

I just cringe every time I see someone as influential as a presidential candidate "imagining a future" where email, PowerPoints and whiteboards are the keys to redefining education.

Redefining education begins by asking ourselves a simple question that my buddy Adam Garry asks his clients all the time:  What do we want to see students doing in our classrooms?  Are creation, communication and collaboration the keys to tomorrow's kingdom?  What sorts of instructional practices support the development and mastery of these skills and behaviors?

Are today's schools effective at developing new learners?  Why? 

Once we have the answers to these kinds of questions, we can begin to choose digital tools responsibly---rather than throwing any more money on misdirected tools like whiteboards and student responders! 

Brainpop and the Overloaded Curriculum. . .

I was poking through my feed reader today and came across a Larry Ferlazzo conversation on In Practice about the merits of Brainpop---a service that provides short, animated cartoons on a range of curricular topics that target middle grades students. 

Responding to a Gary Stager post criticizing Brainpop as a "shallow easily pitched curriculum product," centered around simplistic cartoons that result in understanding that is "unlikely or purely accidental," Ferlazzo points out that Brainpop videos are nothing more than a tool for extending other learning experiences developed by teachers:

The key to teaching, and learning, in my view is what you do with students prior to and after their reading or watching the material. Sticking a student in front of an individual computer without combining that action with activities that access prior knowledge, without including small group collaborative learning, or without adding other engaging questions to provoke higher-order thinking skills is just taking the “easy way out.”

While I'd love to wrestle with what responsible instruction with a tool like Brainpop actually looks like, I thought that the most interesting nugget in this conversation came when Stager wrote:

My viewing of BrainPop cartoons suggests that too many topics are addressed in too little time, with complex issues, stories or concepts reduced to the most trivial level of education - vocabulary development.

Well, welcome to my world, Gary.

Brainpop cartoons aren't the only place that too many topics are addressed in too little time.  You're describing my curriculum---and it is a curriculum that I'm held accountable for teaching to twelve-year olds each year! 

Take sixth grade science, for example.  My curriculum requires that students learn about folding, faulting, deposition, crustal plate movement, volcano patterns, and earthquake patterns.  They must also learn about the rock cycle, the carbon cycle, the water cycle and the nitrogen cycle.  We study the properties of soil, including

• Color.
• Horizon profile.
• Infiltration.
• Soil temperature.
• Structure.
• Consistency.
• Texture.
• Particle size.
• pH.
• Fertility.
• Soil moisture

Then, we look at how humans can use vegetative cover, responsible agriculture and land use, nutrient balance and "soil as a vector" (whatever that is!) to control the impact that their activities have on the pedosphere.

And that covers the content in just one of SEVEN objectives!

Now, I know all about the lip-service that we pay to "identifying essential outcomes" and "eliminating non-essential outcomes" from the curriculum.  Heck, people like Bob Marzano and Rick Stiggins have been writing about the excessive number of benchmarks defined by state curriculum guides for years now

Few people working in today's classrooms really believe that we can get through our entire standard course of study in one year.

But teachers often feel incredibly torn when they are forced to leave required outcomes out of their plans.  There is almost constant fear that we might be called on the carpet by our administrators for knowingly "skipping" content in our curriculum.  No one in a position of authority has ever given me stated permission to hack away at the instructional objectives defined in my standards.

What's more, we rarely know which content will remain untested---and in today's world, the pressure to perform makes leaving topics out a risky proposition at best.  We are, after all, a "data-driven" profession, aren't we?  Numbers matter---and poor coverage can lead to poor numbers.

So---whether we'll admit it or not----most teachers do a lot of "teaching by mentioning it"----and services like Brainpop look good to us because we can knock several benchmarks out in short periods of time without massive amounts of preparation and planning.

Am I proud of the fact that I'll teach students about the Roman Empire this year in about 40 minutes by working through three or four Brainpop videos?

Nope. 

But until decision-makers wake up and pare down the curriculum, working with an awareness of the amount of time that we have available for instruction and placing emphasis on more meaningful outcomes for teaching and learning, I haven't got a lot of options. 

I've just got 7,000 standards---and a heaping cheeseload of vocabulary---to teach!

(Image Credit:  Pressure by Casey Serin, licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution)

Scoring Voicethread Participation. . .

One of the most common questions that teachers ask me about using Web 2.0 tools in teaching is, "How do you assess the work that your students produce in the different digital projects that they are involved in?" 

My first response is always, "Why do we have to assess everything?!  Can't there ever just be opportunities to create, collaborate and communicate for creation, collaboration or communication's sake?"

Then, I return to the real world---where assessment is the first step towards credibility---and work up grading opportunities that are student-centered, meaningful, and tailored for the unique skills emphasized by each tool that I use in my classroom. 

My first stab at assessing digital work started with wikis, where I use this set of criteria to rate the work my students produce.  When assessing blog work, I've chosen to use the ideas of Konrad Glogowski---who writes over at the Blog for Proximal Development and has developed this method for engaging students in reflective thought about their blogging efforts.   

Recently, I've tinkered with a system to assess my students' participation in Voicethread conversations.  Essentially mirroring the reflective aspects of Konrad's blogging handouts, I've decided to ask my students the following four questions while we're working with a new Voicethread:

• Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that closely matches your own thinking.   Why does this comment resonate---or make sense to---you?
• Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that you respectfully disagree with.  If you were to engage in a conversation with the commenter, what evidence/argument would you use to persuade them to change their point of view?
• Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that challenged your thinking in a good way and/or made you rethink one of your original ideas.  What about the new comment was challenging?  What are you going to do now that your original belief was challenged?  Will you change yoru mind?  Will you do more researching/thinking/talking with others?
• Highlight the strand of conversation from our Voicethread conversation that was the most interesting or motivating to you. Which ideas would you like to have more time to talk about? Why? What new topics does this conversation make you want to study next?

Download VT_Scoring.doc

The cool part about assessing Voicethread presentations this way is that each question essenitally forces my students to interact with our conversation in a really meaningful way.  To craft careful answers, they must truly consider the comments of others---an essential skill for promoting collaborative versus competitive dialogue---and compare those comments against their own beliefs and preconceived notions. 

That's metacognition at its best!

What's even better is that when students know that these questions form the basis of our Voicethread assessment from the beginning of a conversation, participation level rise remarkably.  While students are looking for project reflection comments, they often end up highly motivated to share their thinking with peers. 

Whaddya' think?

(Image credit:  Speak Out by Chris Schuepp, licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution)

Introducing Digital Tools to Teachers

Scott McLeod---the brains behind Dangerously Irrelevant---wrote an interesting post recently titled Ed Tech Quarantine.  In it, Scott argues that educational technology groupies often chase new teachers away from technology with our digital giddiness. 

He writes:

One of the most common refrains heard from teachers or administrators who listen to us talk or blog about all of these new cool tools is “Why do I care about this as an educator?” In our eagerness to share our nearly-palpable glee and excitement, we often struggle to adequately answer the “So what?” question in ways that are substantive and meaningful to the average teacher or administrator.

Scott goes on to propose a plan that he believes might make introducing educational technology to teachers easier that includes extensive piloting and perfection of classroom applications of new tools before advocacy with others begins.  He writes:

I believe that an emphasis on pilot testing, experimentation, and identification of both mainstream educator use(s) and optimal training mechanisms before introduction to other educators often would help us quite a bit. Instead of turning off the very educators that we want using many of these tools, some time spent in the ed tech quarantine might go a long way toward facilitating our overall goal of greater technology adoption in K-12 classrooms.

Scott's ideas definitely ring true to me, primarily because I live on the digital edge and I've seen time and again how my acceptance of new digital tools actually chases my peers away!  They truly believe that I'm an odd bird who knows things about technology that they couldn't possibly know---so the tools that I embrace must automatically be beyond their own comfort and ability level. 

In that sense, I'm not particularly influential when it comes to pushing new uses for instructional technologies because I just don't look like the average teacher! 

Now, I'm also savvy enough to recognize the impact that I'm having on my peers---and I realized long ago that to be influential, I was going to have to do a bit of work on the digital dark-side.  So when pushing instructional technologies, I seek out progressive teachers that are seen as the electronic equals of their peers and work to introduce them to new applications for tools that can help to facilitate collaborative work with colleagues. 

Yup.  You read that right.  In my early conversations with teachers, I actually try to AVOID classroom uses of new tools!  While my ultimate goal is to see instruction change in classrooms because of digital tools, I'm also a full-time classroom teacher.  I know full well that changing instruction is an incredibly time-consuming process---and time is the resource that teachers just plain don't have enough of in our schools.

Instead, my singular focus is to show teachers how to use new digital tools to save time or add value to their professional lives.  I start with things like shared bookmarking between members of a learning team to reduce cross-team email and to make resource sharing fluent and easy.  I also introduce tools like Google Docs to create shared lesson plans and team documents.

Here's the handout that I use when putting the sell-job on faculties.  It lists several possible "first-steps" that teachers can take to begin exploring digital tools:

Download Handout_Choices_Web.doc

Notice how the tasks listed across the top of the web (where teachers are likely to look first) are all oriented towards facilitating collaboration and professional learning?  These are tasks that teachers are already responsible for and consumed by. 

If I can show teachers how to use digital tools to make this work easier, I'm sure to find an ally or two, aren't I?

Sometimes I feel guilty about my approach because it doesn't immediately result in more student-centered instructional practices. Teachers continue teaching in the same way they've always taught.

But the way I see it, teachers' number one concern is always time---so if they can see value in digital tools as professional time savers, they'll be more likely to embed those tools completely into their own lives.  And once those tools become a natural part of their daily work and learning patterns, they're more likely to incorporate them into their instruction.

Here's an example:

I've got a buddy who tells me about twice a week that he couldn't live without the feed reader I helped him to set up because it helps him to find current event titles that he uses in daily instruction.  He's also jazzed because he's stumbled upon a collection of blogs by librarians that are pushing his professional growth and knowledge of his content area.

Now, he's yet to try to introduce RSS feeds to students at all---and he's not using blogs in class either. His instruction has remained largely unchanged.  But I believe that with time, he's likely to start to show his students how RSS feeds can change their own learning too---simply because it's so important to his own growth.

Does this make sense to you?

I guess what I'm wrestling with is should we even focus on the instructional applications of digital tools when working with peers who've yet to dive into the digital waters?

Can we trust that a person who has their own learning and work patterns changed by digital tools will naturally translate those new patterns into their classrooms?

Is the trickle-down theory of digital professional development that I've been pushing productive?

Bill, who is saddened by the destruction of a digital generation.

(Image credit:  IMG_0982 by Karen Castens, licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution)

Need a Bit of Digital Help. . .

Alright, Radical readers---I need a bit of digital help! 

I've got a good friend who moved on to become one of the best principal professional developers that I know.  His current project is designed to try to help school leaders understand that the kinds of leadership traits and behaviors that support new teachers are not always the same as the kinds of leadership traits and behaviors that support experienced teachers.

Basically, he's hoping to get principals to differentiate a bit---and that's not a bad thing at all!

The only hitch is that he needs to begin collecting a bit of anecdotal data from real live practicing educators---which is why he contacted me!  Knowing that I'm still in the classroom, he figured I could convince a few of my practitioner buddies to fill out a short, five question survey detailing the kinds of working conditions that either keep them in---or drive them away from---the buildings where they work.

Now, you know me:  I'm a digital junkie, so I immediately saw this as a way to experiment with one of my favorite new tools----the form feature of Google Docs.  I took his survey and whipped it into a neat little form that you can fill out here:

School Leadership Survey

It'll take you anywhere from five minutes to five hours depending on how thoughtful you are---or how much you like/dislike your current teaching situation! 

The best part is that once you hit "Submit," your answers will automatically be added to a spreadsheet for me.  Just like that, I'll have a growing collection of answers that paint a picture for principals about the kind of working conditions that matter to teachers from all points on the teaching spectrum. 

What do you get out of all of this?

Well, if my undying love isn't enough, I'll promise to write a blog post in the near future explaining how you, too, can create forms using Google Docs.  It's a pretty nifty little feature that has about a thousand applications for classroom teachers.

And feel free to email this post along to every teacher that you know!  The more replies we get, the better our chances are of influencing the principals who are leading our schools.

(Image credit:  Help Point by Mark Hillary , licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution)

Defining Wiki-Goodness

I've been doing a lot of thinking about wikis lately, primarily because they're probably the easiest Web 2.0 tool for teachers to begin using.

Sometimes I'm blown away by the fact that wikis are free!  After all, I think I've got about five or six different wikis cooking right now. 

I'm using this wiki to create daily current event reading lessons with a few colleagues on my hallway, this one to house the materials that I put together for presentations on using digital tools in the classroom, and this one to house the materials that a buddy of mine and I have put together for presentations on professional learning communities. 

I've also done a bunch of work with wikis in my classroom---and I'm not sure that I've hit the motherload there yet.  I did stumble across this pretty incredible wiki recently—and I'm planning on trying to use it as a model with my own students someday. 

As I look at more and more wikis being created by students, I think the following four traits is what defines "wiki goodness" to me:

Accurate Content:  The initial fear that every teacher has when approaching work with wikis is the constant risk that students will learn to embrace a tool that may just promote the sharing of inaccurate content.  With the much-publicized horror stories of false information appearing on major wiki sites like Wikipedia, we've become hesitant to embrace wikis as a teaching tool.

And in some ways, these fears are justified.  Because wikis are open websites that can be edited by anyone at any time, content on wikis is often changing—and at any given time, wikis can contain information that is just plain wrong.

But in many ways, that risk is what makes wikis such a valuable teaching tool!  The most accomplished wiki-educators don't shy away from inaccurate content posted on classroom wiki projects.  Instead, they embrace it as an opportunity to teach students about the importance of judging the reliability of online sources. 

While they are constantly pushing students to proofread their work for accuracy—and while they value accuracy in the products that are produced by their students—they also recognize that content errors are new opportunities to teach students about information literacy. 

Deep Linking:  Higher level learning experiences require learners to read and react to information.  Synthesizing and evaluating content created by others is essential before new understandings can be developed. 

In wiki work, evidence of this synthesis and evaluation can be seen in the number and quality of resources linked to on a wiki page.  As new content is developed, links from a variety of reliable resources are inserted to provide evidence that supports the thinking of the authors. 

Deep linking forces students to make connections between their own beliefs and external evidence.  It also serves as an additional opportunity for classrooms to have conversations about judging the reliability of online sources.  Wiki pages with extensive links to credible sources are more likely to be trustworthy than those with limited links to questionable sources. 

Evidence of Group Revision:  Wikis are designed for collaboration, plain and simple.  They are tools that facilitate the asynchronous work of groups around content that is of shared interest.  As a result, accomplished academic wiki pages have evidence of extensive group revision. 

Page discussion boards include ongoing conversations about quality and content—and a careful exploration of the page history button (generally found somewhere in the header or footer of each wiki page) will reveal an extensive collection of previous versions.

In many ways, group revision is the greatest challenge for teachers interested in incorporating wiki work into their classrooms because students are inherently tentative about making meaningful edits to one another's work.  Used to the traditional isolation of the American classroom—where collaboration has generally been somewhat simple or superficial—peers generally use wiki pages as places to post their own content, rather than to make changes to content posted by others. 

Over time and with constant modeling, however, students embrace the collective nature of wiki pages and begin to make meaningful revisions to the work of their peers. 

Quality Presentation:  Accomplished wikis are really no different from accomplished writing in any other format:  They demonstrate the use of age appropriate grammar, punctuation and spelling.  Writers recognize that effective communication depends on their ability to create pieces that are easy to understand and unencumbered by mistakes.

For many teachers, wikis become natural forums for reviewing grammar and spelling rules with students!  Because errors are almost always going to be present in constantly changing work being created by kids, wikis are built-in, real world opportunities for proofreading practice.   

Accomplished wikis also demonstrate age-appropriate levels of visual presentation.  Images and embedded video are often used to enhance wiki pages.  Creators maintain a balance, however, between appropriate use of multimedia content and digital overkill, recognizing that interactive elements can distract readers.

Do these categories make any sense to you?  Am I leaving anything out in my quest for wiki-nirvana? 

I kind of feel like this is my own quest for the Holy Grail!

(Image credit:  DSC_6157 by JPKWitter, licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution)