ISTE11+Group+17

**Group 17's Awesome Wiki about 21st Century Science Skills**
 * Collaborative research across disciplines
 * Digital citizenship
 * Communication - both oral and written

Do you use wikis in your classroom? No, I actually have a ning for each of my classes? Nings are closed social networks that allow the kids to blog post and/or contribute to discussion forums from anywhere. It removes the concern of parents of having their middle school child's picture or work on the internet, but still allows kids to publish their work for review by everyone who belongs to the ning. Class notes from interactive white boards, links to web based information/applets/videos, syllabi, etc can all be added to the ning. Controls can be set so anything students want to post needs to be approved first. Students can not invite new members, only the teacher can. Experts in the community can be invited to join - the kids love to receive comments on their work from these experts. Students have their own member pages. My students refer to our ning as an "academic facebook". Ning has a yearly fee, but Pearson Education underwrites all educational nings.

Uses in my classroom:
 * post class notes
 * connect class outside of school - snow days, etc
 * keep discussions going outside of class
 * post additional resources: web articles, applets, etc.
 * post student work for peer review - everyone can comment on each other's blog posts
 * "flip teaching" where my students watch a 6-10 minute video of a new lesson from home at night (their homework), allowing them to pause and rewind me and watch the explanation of new concepts and skills over and over again, if needed. We then use class time to do collaborative problem solving activities using the new concepts and skills and I become the facilitator and coach.