4th Grade Construction

My goals are:

• Give students a first look at wikis and some practice using one.
• Express in writing support for their ideas about their own work and others’.
• Read a non-fiction article and add text features based on what they believe the main idea is.

How will you know if this site is helping your users reach the objectives you’ve defined for them?

I will be looking for thoughtful responses and I will be looking for them to be supporting their contributions in the history log and discussion threads. Supporting their ideas — that will be the thing I stress over and over and over — because most 4th graders are just not that good at it. I think that they will be more motivated to make good points knowing that it is on a wiki and that their peers will be reading what they write. I don’t expect them to have much trouble editing an existing wiki page — I think the simplicity of this site serves as a good opportunity for them to become familiar with wikis. Since there are six different articles and the students are going to rotate through all of them, I will have many opportunities for giving feedback if they do have trouble with any parts of the project. I would expect as they rotate through each article that their contributions would improve each time, and that discussions would increase.