Journal 5 - Wiki v. Blogs

My tool is the Wiki - I think. I viewed a thread on Classroom 2.0 where a teacher (Dai) using a moodle learning environment asked advice regarding whether to use a wiki or a blog for an online reading record. The consensus was that the wiki would provide the students with a more collaborative experience. One suggestion that I liked was to create different pages for each book so that the students working on that particular book could work collaboratively(Ric Murry). Another aspect which recommends a wiki over a blog is that all students could find out about all books even those that they are not reading(Ric Murry).

One draw back which was mentioned was how to keep track of students within the wiki environment because the teacher was using Moodle. This caused me to find out about Moodle and I signed up for it but have not yet decided if it is a viable option for me to use in the classroom.

The advantage of using blogs within Moodle might be to keep a quick record of how much and what students contribute. The grading becomes student-based in the blog, as opposed to book-based in the wiki.

The reason I would still go for the wiki is that I could monitor conversations daily, and as far as grading student contributions I would keep up with their participation daily instead of collecting their work at the end of the project.

However, Nancy Cavillones stated that: If you use an elgg-based such as Youth Voices, you can have students create their own accounts on YV, then create a community for each book. The students would join that community, and post to the community blog about the book.
http://youthvoices.net

So I have to say that I would still explore using the blog as well as the wiki....