There are ten suggested ways of using wiki in language teaching mentioned in the paper Nikki assigned us the other day. As we discussed them yesterday, I found sharing lesson plans on wiki particularly interesting to me. I have applied a project titled Creating Teacher Community to Promote Young English Teachers' Professional Development, and as the classroom discussion went on, I suddenly realized what an effective tool wiki could be that I could take advantage of to carry out a teacher community!
I kept on thinking about this topic last night, and I've got two ideas of using wikis in teacher community up till now. The most difficult problem young and inexperienced language teachers face is that they spend too much time working on their individual lesson plans and have too little time for researches. Therefore, wiki can help us solve this two-edged problem.
On the one hand, we could share our lesson plans on wiki. Each teacher in the community would concentrate on one lesson plan in a semester. Other teachers are welcome to make revisions and suggestions to it on wiki. In this way, a lot of time would be saved and I'm sure our lesson plans would be better than those designed by us individually.
On the other hand, we could put forward some research topics through our reflection program on wiki. That is, the community members should collaborate to build up a wiki reflecting our own classrooms and finding theoretical discussions on these issues. Then we could connect our ideas by links and I am picturing a wonderful EFL forum on our wiki in my mind! In this way, we will have a lot of topics for our research and development in our own classrooms, for example, carrying out action research to solve some problems in our own classroom. The following result, no doubt to explain further, would be benefits to our teaching as well as our researching abilities. What's more, we are not diverted from our utmost purpose of helping our students with their language learning.
Individual work is valuable, but it is far from enough. Only through collaborative work and enlightening sparks can we develop professionaly. I am excited about this idea myself, and if you are also interested in this idea, would you please join me?
This may be my favorite post yet! I think you have great ideas, and I am very excited for you to use this tool in your pursuit for more collaboration among teachers. I will try to remember to remind the class to check out this blog posting to spark some reactions to your proposal. Great job!!
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