Class run websites and wikis are the fashionable new learning tool that many educators are talking about. From Shelly Terrell (a guest on the digitalplay blog) to Renata Wilmot at bell campus who led a workshop on using weebly.com websites. But so many attempts at using google groups, wikis, forums and websites run by your students simply never work (or at best only work initially).
Most, including my own initial attempts at using such websites don’t work for one of 3 reasons.
- Capability: – Students need to be capable of maintaining the website (or the teacher needs to be). Many teachers simply don’t have time to maintain a website for each of their classes on top of their other commitments. Other teachers don’t have the technological knowhow to do so. Students often have the same problems. Either they don’t have the language capabilities or they don’t have the computer skills to make such a website work (especially with young learners).
- Motivation: – Students or teachers simply aren’t interested or are otherwise unmotivated to use or run the website
- Constructive:- students don’t benefit from having the website (specifically that they don’t improve their English by using or making it)
Capability
One of the biggest mistakes teachers make when setting up such sites for their students is that they over-estimate their students’ technological capabilities. A tiny number of your students will ever have made a post on wikipedia or otherwise run their own website aside from a Myspace or facebook page. Giving a class a web address and telling them what to do simply won’t work. You must be prepared to spend some lesson time on the website initially.
Motivation
Primarily this is about knowing your students. The website is essentially extra-curricular in most cases and thus students need to be motivated to do it. Are your students likely to find the idea of running their own class website exciting or boring? This leads on to the last point…
Constructive
What do you want your students to gain from the website. If you work in a secondary school and your primary aim is that students learn how to run their own website then you need to think more closely about their motivation for doing so. If your primary aim is for students to improve their English then you need to think about how they are going to do this by running the site. Specifically it brings about questions of error correction. Someone will need to check that the website is being used as it should be, that common errors are not reinforced and other time-consuming formatting details.
How to:
Once you’ve thought about the points above and how you’re going to tackle them, you’ll need to set up the website. I’m not going to lie, the first time you do this it will be time-consuming. I like wikispaces it follows the simple and familiar layout of wikipedia and other wikis, it’s free, has no ads, it’s easy to view who has changed the website and undo changes. You can register a wikispace for education at the link above. Create the basic sections or pages of the site so that it is ready for your students to use. Then you need to create accounts for your students. This is actually really easy using wikispaces for educators as it has a “create users” function under the “manage wiki” section. You can simply copy and paste your class registers into the box and then create some simple passwords (names backwards for example). You don’t need students’ email addresses and all the users are created in one go.
Introducing the website
Plan to spend some lesson time with the class. Give them a handout with the wiki address, their username and their password on it so they don’t loose it. The handout could then contain some very simple tasks to familiarize students with the wiki and what to do. E.g. “Sign in”, click the “edit” button and write a sentence about yourself, don’t forget to click “save” (it’s important the students succeed in writing something on the wiki, however small, whilst in class). Perhaps follow this with some comprehension questions based on the template you’ve created (what do you write on the “my english page”, where can you write your new words etc). This is best done with pairs on a computer rather than the whole class in the computer room since a whole class of people editing at exactly the same time often leads to messy and incomplete saves. I usually then set some compulsory homework after this first session to back-up what the students have done and ensure that everyone is capable of contributing. After this the task is to maintain the momentum
Long term contributions
Encouraging long-term contributions from the class is often the hardest part. First of all be very clear with the students about the aim of the website. Explain to them how exactly it will be useful to them and explain that the website will only be as good as they make it. The website should also be fun and interesting for students to make (especially with young learners whose main motivation in class is having fun rather than the self-awareness that the learning itself is important for them). I also rotate “moderators”, a student whose job it is to correct any mistakes and ensure that there is new content, every week or month.
An Example
http://avo-bell.wikispaces.com
Class is pre-intermediate (A2.2) 11 and 12 year olds
Students motivation is that they get their own website run by themselves with minimal input from the teacher. They get to write about things that they are interested in. They get to share their interests and ideas with students in other classes. They get to share their new words (less work for them). They get a self-made revision section to revise for tests.
Benefits: Initially the idea was simply to encourage students to write in English outside the classroom (since many students already read or listen to English). They also gain a self-awareness of errors since they take it in turn to be moderators and correct the mistakes of their classmates (observed by the teacher who makes any necessary changes). There are numerous other advantages such as collaboration and a sense of purpose for their language learning.
Ideas for your class wikis
- A word list updated by students
- revision pages for each chapter in your textbook (again made by students)
- a discussion forum (wikis automatically include a discussion forum for each page)
- Record when students use their language outside of the classroom (like a testimonial)
- give students a platform to write in English
- share useful websites and games for language learning with your students
- give notices to your students
Has anyone else tried setting up a class website? Did it work? If not what went wrong? If yes what do you use it for. Please let me know in the comments below
Magical TEFL 