Class Blog or Class Wiki?

For people who are just deciding to get something set up for their classes, a big question seems to be blog or wiki? And of course my answer is - "depends"!

I'll try to give you some points to think about that may narrow your decision making process so that you can get something that will work for you. So, here are some questions to consider...

1. Who is your primary audience for this site? I will say that if your primary audience is parents - my opinion is that a blog is the way to go. They read just like a newsletter, they are easy to navigate, and the posts show in dated order, with the most recent at the top. People can easily navigate back to earlier posts, and the information never goes away, it is just archived. Blogs can host links, pictures, videos, and other embedded programs, and they are very easy to use. You can also have "guest bloggers" (like students) to get a little student voice. Side bars are handy for helpful links and other widgets like polls.

If your primary audience is students, then next question...

2. Will the site be used for news updates for students? If the site will just be used for news updates, like a "scrapbook" showing highlights of student work (articles, student pieces, videos, pictures, etc.) then I still think a blog is probably the way to go - same reasons as for question #1.

If you do not want to run a general student "bulletin board", then next quesion...

3. Will the site be used for regularly posted class information? Do you just want a place to post the homework assignment? Your lesson plan? One or two important links students will need for an activity? If this is the case, a basic blog will still do the trick. Daily small doses of information in the form of text or links would work nicely in a blog. Students could easily navigate back to previous days, or access assignment or class information when they are absent.

4. Do you want to host a class (or classes) online - posting assignments, project outlines, class calendars, syllabus, links, places to categorize units of study, classes, and student work? Definitely go wiki. Wikis are great in their versatility. They can work like a blog, but work great as a way to categorize and add to a growing body of information for your students. You can give your students access to certain parts of a wiki too if you want - then they can post information as well.

Of course my answers are not the RIGHT answers - many other people have some pretty creative ideas for ways to use these. I would suggest that if you are just beginning with this (and you are a middle or high school teacher) that you pick one class to start with and go through the decision making process I have just outlined. As your comfort level grows, expand your class, or add more classes.

I personally use a combination of blogs and wikis for each of my 6 classes. I use a blog as my "portal". This is a central place that all of my students in all of my classes go. The blog serves as a general newsletter - mostly for students, but parents may enjoy the "lite" news on there as well. I try to get lots of pictures of the kids on there - students and parents like to see that. I use the side bar on that page for links to each of my class wikis (I host a wiki page for each of my 6 classes). I also use the sidebar of the blog to post links to all of the student blog pages. The blog is a central page where all of my students can get to anything they need.

Each of my class wikis is like a growing online "textbook" for that particular course. I have a main introduction page, then a page for the class calendar, and different categories - an assignment page, and different pages for different units of study.

That works for me - I would definitely suggest you use the guiding questions I have posted above to find your starting point and go from there.

You've made the decision - now what?
Two good free and easy blogging platforms I could suggest are Blogger and WordPress. I have used both, although I am more familiar with Blogger (this blog is hosted by Blogger).

I highly recommend Wikispaces for a super-easy wiki. They are simple to set up and very easy and versatile. I have found them to be a very dependable wiki host.

Listen to your blog!

It has occurred to me plenty of times that there are certain students in my classes who may struggle a little to read or understand some of the information I put on my news blog and my class wiki pages. Since my students depend so much on those sites, I've been looking for ways to help them out, just in case the reading is a barrier to their understanding. Of course we discuss much of our content and ideas in class, but when a student is working with the material outside of my class, the material should still be accessible to them.

So to that end I've been looking through a lot of different text-to-speech players to see what I can use on my main blog and on my individual class wikis. Earlier this week I came up with two solutions.

Solution #1. For the main class blog page, I've installed Odiogo. Odiogo is a "media-shifting" technology that transforms the text on my blog into a high quality, almost human sounding voice that reads the text of my posts to the students. This couldn't have been easier to install - all I had to do was put the url address of my class blog on the site and viola! When parents or students go to my class blog they can just click the "listen now" button and a very nice human-like voice reads my blog post!

Solution #2. Odiogo is a beautiful technology for blogs, but it doesn't work on wikis, so I had to find another alternative. I ended up using a little text-to-speech editor I found last year and posted about called itcansay. Itcansay is very simple text-to-speech technology which was originally created for ESL students. Simply copy and paste the text you want read into the box on the page, click "read it" and you hear a very computer-sounding voice (not as nice as Odiogo) read the text that was pasted in. There are several other good text-to-speech sites, but what I liked about itcansay is that there are not a lot of bells, whistles, or distractions for my middle school students.

*note - although the note on their site says conversion may take a few minutes, I have not found this to be true - conversion takes only a few seconds at most.

So all I did was put itcansay on each of my class wikipages as a link that will open in another window. I showed the students how it worked by having them copy and paste things into it like some directions I wrote, some text from another link I put on the wiki, and even a question I wrote into a Googleform on their assignment. Now they can always have itcansay open in another tab, ready and available should they need to listen to some text as they are studying.

Text-to-speech in class can be a little distracting, so we have invested in $2/pair earbuds for each class. I put each set of earbuds in a baggie with the students names on them, and keep a basket for each class at the back of my room. The kids get them at the beginning of class if they wish and keep one earbud in to "hear" text if they need to and one earbud out so they can hear me.

Right now about 1/3 of the students in my classes regularly use the earbuds and the text-to-speech tools, which is enough to make me glad I installed them!

Less paper = more time

I had to bear with paperwork at the beginning of this school year for about 3 weeks longer than I wanted to. It took a week or two for the laptops to get set up, and I didn't want to throw the kids into too much stuff all at once, especially since they were adjusting to the laptops, new classes, new teachers, and a new schedule. So I have held back on making my life easier - but this week I took the first steps with my middle school students by using Google Docs for a few assignments.

Within Google Docs is a little item called "forms". It is a pretty easy way to just make a form (i.e. assignment). I embed my forms into my class wiki pages so the students can work on them there, but you can also easily email them to students as well (all high school students and many middle school students have emails - get their addresses!).

All you need to make a Google Doc is a Gmail address - if you have that you have a Google account. Just go to the menu up top and look for Documents. Once there, just click the "new" menu.

Choose "form" from there and begin to create yours (I always make my first question "Type your name here".) You can make fill in the blank, short answer, short essay response, and multiple choice forms quite easily. I can also pick a theme so the form isn't just a boring black and white screen.

I made the first assignment one that would be easy on my students, since this is the first time using an online form for most of them. I made a pretty straightforward vocabulary assignment and embedded it into the wikis for my 6th, 7th, and 8th grade English classes.

Today I introduced them to their new word lists like always, and then I took them to the assignments page and walked them through the basics of this form. I was very happy that unlike the paper/pencil assignments, they seemed pretty engaged in this - they were more focused on using their other tools like Visuwords to match up and try out their new vocabulary, and getting the correct responses typed into the form. Again - this was a pretty simple, straightforward type of assignment - but after using Google Docs daily, it won't be long before these kids are comfortable with anything!

Here is the best part for me - instead of a stack of notebook papers or worksheets wrinkled up, torn, and covered with scribbles and sometimes indecipherable middle school writing, and often put into the wrong inbox, I just get to see this lovely spreadsheet:

Isn't that a thing of beauty? Sure there are misspelled words - but I can read them! I can also compare them to others in the class and at a glance be able to see problems that students seemed to struggle with. Tomorrow in class, I will focus on those particular items, and not waste time on others that the students seem comfortable with.

The second a student hits the submit button at the bottom of the form, I get it in a spreadsheet with a timestamp! Isn't that cool? As I sit here at home tonight I can tab over to my Google Docs and see who has finished their homework tonight and how they've done on it!

Google Docs and forms makes formative assessment quick, simple, and pretty accurate. I know how to adjust and differentiate my instruction immediately from the feedback!

Starting the year with class blogs and wikis

For my class set up this year I have decided to use a combination of a "home" blog (using Blogger), and then linked wikis for each class. The home blog can have frequent general messages to students and parents about what's going on with the 1to1 laptops, and maybe some general info about my classes and expectations. That's where I also post the links to my class wikis in the sidebars. Over time, I'll add more widgets to the sidebar but for right now I'll start slow so that the kids and their parents can get used to the idea.


I've set up some simple wikis using Wikispaces for each class. Again, I'm taking this in baby steps - I haven't invited the kids to be "members" of the wikis yet - they are basically being used as web pages right now as I continue to add content. The kids simply go to those places for some class links, info, and assignments. The only pages I've added to those are a calendar page (Google Calendar), page for our current unit of study that has links, news, and assignments, and on some of them just some extra activity pages.


I foresee these becoming more dynamic and interactive as time goes on, but for now we'll just do one or two things at a time.

If you are interested in checking out what I've done so far, go to my class home blog and click the links on the right to see the classes. When you get to the class wikis, the menus are on the left to see other things besides the class home page.

I'd be interested to hear about other types of set-ups people are using for their classes with free open source stuff like Google and Wikispaces.