My further incentive to learn about this has to do with my role as the main proponent of using blogs to improve the writing abilities of the students at SBP. As we learned more about blogs and wikis, several teachers and I began to realize the possibilities, and the challenges, of using blogs and wikis in our classrooms. One of my primary concerns is the apparent unwieldy nature of signing-up our rosters of students into the blogs and wikis that I, as the classroom teacher, would create for each class. To be included as a contributor into a wiki or a blog, a student must sign-up with the provider of the blog/wiki, which would be either blogger.com or wikispaces.com (during the seminar, we had a chance to investigate other providers, but these seemed like the most easy to use, and also the most popular). The current nature of the email system at SBP would cause a delay in the sign-up process, and I hope I've been able to find a work-around to that concern.
Here's my plan, and let's see if it works.
First, I will implement this wiki process incrementally, one class at a time, and then, at the 'micro' level, one student and one web application at a time. The first class that will begin the process will be the Physiology class.
Second, each student will (as homework) open a Google account, and not just any account, but one that uses their current SBP email as his username. If this sounds confusing, here's the (short) background story. In order to use Google docs, a person must invent a unique username, one that no one else in the Google system already uses or owns. I found out, through several conversations, that this username can be an email address. Yes, on Google, your username can be an email address. The signup process then asks for the person's email address, and the same email address that was entered as the username can be used! In the case of SBP students, this will (obviously) be their sbp.org email address. The confirmation email then sent by Google, and the student will then be able to enter into Google docs.
Third, the students will then enter into Google docs, and then type their name into an Excel spreadsheet. Important: their name will be in this format (SBP email username.sbp). That is: their username at SBP, then a dot, then the letters 'sbp'. Example, if John Smith's SBP email is smithj at sbp.org, then they would enter jsmith.sbp as their name. You'll see later why this is important.
(The first two steps accomplish two things: the student has created a Google account, using his sbp email as his Google username and that student will be able to enter into Google docs; and, the student will help to create an Excel spreadsheet that will be used in the next several steps).
Fourth, the students must be made a 'member' of the classroom wiki. When a wiki is created (as a K-12 educational wiki), the wiki creator/administrator has the ability to create 'memberships' into wikispaces without needing an email address. This is critical for students in very young grades, because many of them do not have emails. Well, why then would I need this function? It turns out that wikispaces emails are somehow blocked by the SBP email system. If I asked students to directly sign up for a wikispaces account, they would not be able to do that using their SBP email. (We would like students NOT to sign up using outside emails, such as yahoo or gmail or aol, because these email applications are also blocked for students at SBP). So this ability to create a wikispace account without using an email is critical (one of the first work-arounds that I have, hopefully, used). The challenge is that this sign-up process requires the wiki creator to upload an Excel spreadsheet that contains the proposed usernames and passwords. Well, that Excel spreadsheet has just been created in the step above. There is a critical step that the teacher must do, though. The teacher has to assign passwords to each student. That could be done by wikispaces, but I'm not sure that the "proposed" password would be received by the student. So, this step needs some 'work' by the teacher. I will use the student's last name with a 123 attached to it as their 'first' email. I will then instruct them to change the password on their own, once they have entered into wikispaces.
So, the fourth step, after the teacher (myself) has entered proposed 'first' passwords into the created Excel file (created in Google docs), is to upload that file into wikispaces, thereby creating the accounts for the students in the class.
This is already a lot to think about, and I congratulate you if you got this far in the reading. I'll post an update to tell you how this went.
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