Flattening the Classroom with Wikis
The Flat Classroom Project By Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis.
Again another collaborative project managed through a wiki. The Flat Classroom Project is a global collaborative project for middle and senior high school students. One of the main goals of the project is to ‘flatten’ or lower the classroom walls so that instead of each class working in isolation, 2 or more classes are joined virtually to become one large classroom.
“Based on the book by Thomas Friedman this project aims to foster project collaboration between students on opposite sides of the world. Using Web2.0 tools students interact and produce a wiki page with content based on one of the ten flatteners from Friedman’s book.”
There’s a lot of interesting bits and pieces to this wiki as the site demonstrates as to how you can use the wiki to managed the whole course (which is quite common for schools without access to an MLE).
The students have to work in pairs to create a digital story (video) in each of three categories for each topic. The categories include design and innovation (students detail an innovation related to their topic), story and empathy (students produce a compelling narrative combining persuasion, communication, and self-understanding) and the fun factor (highlight the fun aspects of the topic).
The multinational groups are very interesting. Check out Group 1 (here). There are 10 students from Qatar, USA, China, Austria and Australia. Each group has been subdivided into 3 sub groups with different remits in regards to completing the final project (design and innovation, story and empathy, the fun factor). The final project for Group 1 can be seen here. Note the rich the content with ample mix of text, web links, images and video – basically this is known as a digital story. The history tab shows that currently 70 edits to the page have been carried out with 40 messages in the discussion attached to the project.
The Rubric page is also interesting (here). Given that more than one school is involved a choice of optional rubrics have been added. There are 3 in all. I’ll provide a brief description but if you wish to use wikis and assess contribution I would advise looking at the full details (here).
Rubric 1: ‘Digital Story’ is used by all classrooms for assessing the multimedia artifact.
Rubric 2: ‘Engagement, Reflection and Evaluation’. Students are required to collaborate with classrooms around the world. The exercise engages students in higher-order learning and thinking skills that include organisation, peer review and reflection activities as well as synthesis of ideas, analysis and evaluation of trends. The reflection is either written or oral form and would address ways to improve the student’s performance and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the project
Rubric 3: ‘Wiki Grading Rubric’ provides a tool for assessing student contribution and engagement with the wiki editing process. The wiki history tab is accessed to determine if the student has contributed proportionately. If a minimal number of contributions are made by the individual student, the grade will be adjusted appropriately.
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