Top Ten Wiki Reflection

Rebecca Pilver's lesson on the Top Ten Most Awesome and Dangerous Sea Animals created an exciting learning opportunity for not only her students, but additionally for her as a teacher. The project offered a wide variety of learning experiences from information about sea life to the use of technology and the Internet. The students' creation of a wiki met WV Standards of Learning as outlined below:

Standard One:
"Experiences are created to advance student learning and systems thinking through processes such as critical thinking, collaboration and problem solving and that encourage creativity, innovation and self‐direction."

Students worked in groups to collect information on several sea animals. This collaboration encouraged students to work together to complete the assignment. Students were required to complete different tasks and display creativity through projects such as the myanimalshape.com profiles.

Standard Two:
"Students’ misconceptions and misunderstanding of concepts are addressed in the lesson design to assure that the appropriate next steps in learning are taken."

Students learned that Top Ten websites reflect only the opinions of whoever is doing the site. Students viewed and critiqued videos while gathering information on their animals. From this information, they formed their own opinions on which animals were the most amazing and dangerous.

Standard Three:
"The teacher extracts data from ongoing formative/classroom assessments to inform and adjust instruction for intervention, enrichment or the next acquisition lesson."

Once the students completed their group's wikis, they viewed those of their classmates. Once all the animals were compared, students were ask to name the most dangerous and amazing animals. Mrs. Pilver believed that the groups would look at each project and judge from that information. However, all the students picked the animal their group worked on as their favorite. Mrs. Pilver had to re-evaluate the lesson. Presented with the problem, Mrs. Pilver approached the class for a solution. The students offered the solution of doing more work so all the projects would have the same types of information and then they could rerank the animals.