Creating A Wiki!

This week playing with my NEW WIKI has been just as exciting as it sounds!  I first looked at PBWiki but it looked so “business like” that it didn’t seem very inviting or easy to navigate.  I liked the larger storage capacity and password protection on the free teacher wikis that were offered on Wikispaces in contrast to the basic page on PBWiki.  Wikispaces made me feel much more confident that this was a task that I could easily accomplish.  I enjoyed playing with my wiki this week and learned a great deal about what worked and what didn’t.  I also realized that sometimes you need to step back from it and approach it fresh at another time to solve a problem.  This was definitely the case with changing the fonts and centering.

My Wiki (http://readingatgloverisfun.wikispaces.com) is an attempt to bring a wiki to my school library.  I see this wiki as a place where students in addition to teachers can comment on books (K-3) that they liked in order to stimulate student interest in various books.  It is also a place where kids, parents, and teachers can request books that they would like to see in the library.  The parent resources page is meant to be an ongoing site for parents to reference various links and post new links that they wish to share with other parents in their community.   There is also a “meet the author” page by grade, a gift book program page, and a link to the Glover School library book catalog.  

I was surprised to find the school web site information page relating to the library resources so out-dated that a large number of the links no longer existed.   I spoke with the both the librarian and the principal to see if this Wikispace would be a helpful tool.  The principal was totally supportive (both financially and creatively) and the librarian was eager to hear more about it.  In the past, there had been a book club and when I mentioned this wiki to the principal she offered some money to buy additional books to fund a new book group!  Look out Oprah's book group, they'll just have to read about our success in the wiki.