Video – Students Building Legacy with Wikipedia
If you’ve been in a session with Alan, Jim or me, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the story about the teacher and students at my former school who built a Wikipedia page for a creole colonial plantation home in New Orleans, called the Pitot House. In addition, you may have listened to a podcast we published several months ago, featuring a teacher who also created a page around an area of interest, the Wodaabe. Since then, we have heard from others who are jumping on board with this idea.
I would like to share a video that was developed by Pat Kyle, a teacher in the Washington D.C. Public School System who worked with a group of students on the early stages of a project called Stories from Shaw. These students, with the help of Pat, a local public librarian and others within the community, are working to build up a written history of places in their community for inclusion within Wikipedia. Their first piece, still in progress, was written about Shiloh Baptist Church.
What makes this type of assignment motivating? What pitfalls, if any, do you see? What other skills are students learning during this process? Have you tried this with a group of your own students? If you have thoughts on any of these questions, please share your story.
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Building Legacy with Wikipedia is a fabulous example of how students can contribute to the web and therefore an authentic audience for their writing. I just made my first contribution to the web as I updated some information about our school district. I am a school superintendent. These kids are ahead of me!
These kids are ahead of me!
That’s always the problem for me, I’ve always wanted to make my contribution to the Internet in my own way I decided to write a guide on distance learning backed by my research in the academia.
I doubt it was used in this project, but teachers interested in this kind of project might want to check out the resources available from http://enwp.org/WP:SUP .
No, this wasn’t used, but it looks fantastic. I’ll pass it along.
I think building legacy with Wikipedia is a great concept so students to can explore and go out there to share their knowledge. This can be a great tool to enhance their writing skills and learn constructing an informative article. This is amazing. I agree that they should continue on this project. It’s a good thing that I came across this blog post. It’s good that there are passionate people like Pat Kyle who are very determined to come up with new ideas for teaching students. I think this would be very effective for the students. I really admire her for this.