Maggie Hennessy

Hello everyone - My name is Maggie Hennessy.

I teach African American and World History to 9th and 10th grade students in Philadelphia. I am lucky to be a part of the Classrooms for the Future technology grant. Because of this grant, I have access to a cart of laptops and an interactive smartboard is installed in my room. I am hoping to gain more expertise to take full advantage of these resources.

I am especially interested in learning more about using wikis for collaboration and communication. My school is a public magnet school for music. Music students are frequently pulled from academic classes for lessons and rehearsals. Having a place where they can locate information, ask me and their classmates questions would greatly help them stay on top of their academic responsibilities. I have a google account that students use to send me work but it isn't really a "hub" for class information. I've also had students create wikipages on different topics and had them do peer reviews so that the different pages were a way to sort of "jigsaw" the information. You can check out their work here.

I've seen a fair number of educational wikis and even though I've used one myself, I still have many questions. Many wikis are so crowded with information that I find them difficult to navigate and explore. One question I have is whether we should separate class wikis from class websites?

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