Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Wikipedia Search

Haai (hello in Afrikaan).

Wikipedia is an internet based encyclopaedia. Wikipedia originated from Nupedia which was also a free English language encyclopaedia that was written by experts and reviewed under a formal process.

Wikipedia was developed to be multilingual and remain a free resource that has the opportunity to be edited and added to by everyone. With that freedom Wikipedia remains to be criticized for its reliability and accuracy and its ability to be referred to in assignment tasks.

As a university student I have not been as a rule, allowed to acknowledge Wikipedia as a source of information gathering. I wonder if we as educators will in turn pass on that thinking to our acceptance of it in assignment tasks we receive.

My search of Wikipedia was in relation to my class growing vegetables and I came across these resources-

· That there are different types of the plant are called the vegetable- leaves, roots, bulbs, stems of plant etc...
· The Latin meaning of ‘vegetable’ and when the term was first used in the English language
· Nutrition
· Colour pigments
· Storage
· How to tell the difference between fruit and vegetables
· Pictures
· Individual uses
· Individual history of each vegetable
· Production trends
· World Health Organisation recommendations

I would take advantage of technology to make these resources available to my students inside and outside the classroom by allowing them time on computers to look at pictures on the web and in clip art- remembering my students are still developing letter and word recognition skills in Prep. Cittadini suggests educators view each child as an individual able to construct their own learning and that we listen, observe, interact and learn from our students. I would let them guide their learning throughout our learning experiences from planting our seeds to utilising our freshly grown vegetables by reading the available information to them as they asked and required.

What do you think? What would you do?

Totsiens (byein Afrikaan).

References:

Cittadini, S. Reggio Emilia Approach to Education. Retrieved on the 12th of March 2009 from http://www.cityneighbors.org/reggioemilia.htm
www.wikipedia.com

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