How NOT to "Wiki" - but I wanted to...

[Peter Westall]

Our current Central Idea is "the production of food is a complex process." (This is IB PYP talk) While students have been finding out about "___________of the world." Just insert what you are interested in...
To date we have potatoes, chillis ( a hot favourite....coiuldn't resist that) and cabbages.
My cochlear implant kid decided to do noodles - ok, fine.
We started 5Wiki.wikispaces.com which is our first entry into Wikis.

Now in the back of many single men's kitchen cupboards invariably lurks a pasta machine. That's what a magazine article quoted one time and which prompted me to buy one here in Malaysia as they are cheap and good quality. It helped too that I had lived in Italy and so knew exactly what I wanted to do....thin layers with pressed Italian parsley pressed in between. But I digress...

I really want some good hands-on stuff happening and some good collaborative stuff mixed with old-fashioned interest and enthusiasm. The challenge was set: we're making noodles in 2 days time and how do we use this thing?

Before I had even started sheets of paper had been shredded and made into spaghetti....ok got that!
A video of Al explaining very carefully about how to make pasta was found. i wondered why my class was unusually quiet until I realised most of them had headphones on and were watching the video. Not bad!

Someone else copied and pasted a recipe into a Wiki page.
I suggested that we put together a table of who is going to bring what.
Someone is finding out background information about Chinese noodles....and hopefully more will happen when the students get home and start editing our Wiki page.
The kid home sick was phoned as he will not want to miss out.

Well, I felt I should have (a) scaffolded the task
(b) prepared a page beforehand, I suppose
(c) neatly put people into groups ....but I didn't....and so far I am very happy with the focus and interest that we have.
A kid was even talking about it while we were having lunch - so that's a good sign.

I'm anticipating some traffic between students tonight in the Discussion areas - this is the first time that they will have done this and squeals of "how do I put in pictures?" will start to come up.

Which is what I want.
It might be messy but I think we'll get the noodles done and start to see how Wikis can be used too.

[Julie Lindsay]

Peter, thanks for sharing your class ideas. I love your 5wiki and your determination to approach this with a casual yet concerned air. I can already see activity on the wiki between students and between you and students via the discussion forums and think this is an exciting way to bring your community into into online learning and lowering the walls of the classroom. How did the noodles turn out??