I am up to 87 videos on my YouTube account. And right now I am at 4371 views. I have been crazy busy with family stuff but still have found time to record all of my math lessons and a few history ones too. It has been a lot easier to track who is watching the videos with the quizzes I am giving at the start of each class. The feedback has been good overall and when I was not able to go to work today due to water backing up in my basement, I had the students watch the video from the previous night. That way the substitute was able to review with them by just hitting a key on the computer.
In history class the students ask me frequently when they can work on the wiki page. For both the 6th and 7th Graders we have been going to the computer lab once a week. Now that they have a handle on how to do it they are getting better and faster. I did have to remind the students about what constitutes an appropriate source to use when we were on the unit on Islam. For the flags, one came up with a crescent and a swastika. So we had a discussion about what is OK to use and what is not.
I had a similar discussion with the students from my Non-Western Culture class and we got onto the topic of Wikipedia. Now I love Wikipedia and use it almost every day but I know the flaws and I wanted to make sure that my students did too. I showed them the Colbert Report episode when he talked about the made up word wikiality to talk about how Wikipedia can be changed if enough people agree to a change even if it is counter-factual. Then I made the mistake of mentioning that a few years ago students had gone onto our school's Wikipedia page and altered it to say that they were notable alumni who had great made up careers at the age of 17. And of course within hours a couple of my students figured out how to add all of their names to the school's page and recognize them all as Nobel Prize winners. I chuckled inside but got them to change it before anyone saw. I also had got to remind them that as moderator of the site I can see everything that they do on it. They were kind of bummed when I told them that I knew about the messages they were sending each other through the wikispaces site. I enjoy teaching them but they can be a handful.
