4th Grade Construction

How will you introduce this to the class? The non-fiction reading skill of using titles, subtitles, etc. to get to the main idea of an article will be worked on in class through shared reading. I will also do shared readings where the text features are covered up and we as a group come up with them. The wiki project will be an extension of what we are doing in class (I do, we do, you do). By the time they get to the wiki, they will know what to do and can focus on using the wiki. I will introduce the wiki whole class and do a demonstration, much like the screencasts on the home page. Probably at first they will try this in class, but later it can be used for homework as well.
What do you have to do to get permission from the powers-that-be at your school? Luckily, my administrator is very supportive when it comes to using technology in the classroom. He is very much interested in developing a 21th century school. The parents and PTA are also on board with this. In fact, the money from the main fund raiser last year was earmarked for more computers (and this was after just getting two laptop carts at the beginning of the year). The PTA also arranged a seminar led by a former FBI agent on how to keep kids safe on the internet. So the support is there at my site! Many of my students had email accounts last year, so hopefully this year there will be some as well. For the ones that don’t, I will create accounts for them using the method Matt shared with our class (in fact I already have one generic student email created and a member of the wiki). I will have them all add their pictures (using photo booth) so that I will know who is who and I am not constantly looking up their class number.