Evaluation+of+an+Educational+Wiki

=Evaluation of An Educational Wiki=

Title: XSquared – http://xsquared.wikispaces.com/
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1. Who designed the wiki?
This wiki was designed and created by a teacher named Mrs. Shutter and her students. Mrs. Shutter is an Algebra 1 teacher at Roycemore School in Evanston, Illinois.

2. Who is the wiki for?
The wiki is for Mrs. Shutter’s students to use to report the findings of their project for Chapter 12 about parabolas. It may also be considered for use by other teachers or students who find the page, such as me, to use in their classrooms.

3. What is the purpose of the wiki?
This wiki’s purpose is for students to demonstrate and share their understanding of parabolas by applying their knowledge of the function to analyze real-world occurrences of this shape in common or famous situations and/or settings.

4. What subject(s) is the wiki for?
The wiki is for a mathematics course, specifically Algebra 1. This wiki also incorporates writing across the curriculum as well as numerous other subjects depending on the specific parabola chosen by each student to investigate, i.e. physics for those choosing a projectile or geography/history for those choosing a structure.

5. What are the main contents included?
This wiki includes a home page that serves as an introduction to the wiki with links to all of the student-created pages. There is a page describing the project as well as a section of the homepage linked to additional resources (some student created) for further reading on parabolas. Each of the student created pages explain required points about different parabolas in the world around us. Each of the student created pages also includes images of their selected parabola as well as graphs inserted from GeoGebra.

6. How do the participants contribute to the wiki?
The wiki is set as “Protected” through Wikispaces, which means that anyone with a connection can view the content, but only members of the wiki can edit the pages. There is an invitation on the homepage from Mrs. Shutters to email her if one would like to be added as a member so that they may participate in the wiki.

7. Do you think the wiki serves its purpose well or not? Explain.
Yes, I do think that this wiki serves its purpose well. This is a great idea for a project, and by completing it in a wiki format, students are encouraged to produce quality work. Students used various different media in their reporting out, and most of the pages are done very well. I do wish, however, that the links at the bottom of the wiki’s homepage titled “What is a parabola and why do we care?” could be more substantial and put together with more information.

8. Report a thing or two you like and dislike about the wiki.
First, I love the idea of the project. This is an excellent means of presenting the project. I also like that the teacher created an example page for students to use as a guide. I have used wikis to for students to complete projects similar to this one, and I have gotten better results when I created an example page. The invitation from Mrs. Shutters on the homepage for anyone to email her to join the page is also a very nice touch. It encourages others to collaborate with her students, and widens the learning community to more than just those students in her classroom. There are a couple of somewhat picky things I did dislike about this page. Firstly, none of the images are cited in the entire wiki aside from the teacher’s example page. A quick 15 minute lesson about Creative Commons content and embedding images from Flickr rather than inserting them as files would easily eliminate this problem and also instill a value of copyright and media ownership in the students so that they can really appreciate the CC-BY-SA tag at the bottom of the pages they have created. Also bothering me, and this is strictly from a math perspective, was that a few of the “parabola” examples used by students are not actually parabolas but actually catenary curves or semi-circles.