Reflections at Pi

We’ve been using a wikispace for class.  Lina set up the one for the first page, and then I added the welcome page and designed the second subject page for the class.  Our plan is to do at least one for each of the major units we do this academic year.  The kids loved the first wiki.  It was on election issues.  It was exciting to see the debate amongst the kids, how they made their arguments and pushed each other to move beyond an unsubstantiated opinion.  I’m pretty confident that if I showed it to another teacher, they’d be impressed (and maybe disbelieving) that these were 6th graders.  My worry is that the novelty will wear off.

The kids were really excited about the election, understandably so.  Some of them raced to get to the wiki at home.  The second unit, not as much.  I think partly, the novelty has worn off, and partly maybe the topic of “human rights” isn’t as compelling to them.  I was hoping they’d continue the debate we had in class.  Maybe that was unrealistic of me.  Maybe they were done with it in class.  I’m thinking of adding a new incarnation around their fictional “advertising groups” around the propaganda art we’ll be studying.  But, I will keep debating whether it is the topic of the unit, the format of my post, or just the novelty wearing off for some.