Recently, I came across with a very interesting online platform called WALLWISHER which can also be used for educational purposes. It can be accessed on www.wallwisher.com and offers people an interactive network for polls and posting ideas, questions, suggestions, answers and comments under a specific topic. Once you have opened an account, you can create a “wall” with a specific topic on which other users can post their impressions, thoughts and ideas. This application was successfully used in a history lesson with the topic “The Gunpowder plot”. In this lesson students had to deal with a particular event in British history. They were supposed to post all relevant information they found about this topic in order to create a sort of online mind-map which should help to visualize the collected information. Students were allowed to upload pictures and images they found on the internet to accompany their postings. The teacher also posted further questions on the wall which had to be answered by the students. Furthermore, students were required to use other online sources like Wikipedia, Google maps or www.geni.com to collect and evaluate required information. For all those who have never heard of geni.com: It´s an online tool for doing genealogy. Students had to create a royal family tree in order to trace back the connections between protagonists of that particular historical event and other historical people.

According to the comments given by the responsible teachers, using wallwisher.com for their history lessons was quite useful. I was a bit concerned about uploading pictures that are taken from the internet, since this can be traced back as copyright violation. Furthermore, collected information from sources like Wikipedia has to be seen critically since some of the given facts can be partly wrong or insufficient. In addition to that, I was wondering whether the students are required to write down all the collected information or not. There would be a risk of losing/forgetting important and necessary information by posting it on wallwisher.com only.

What do you think?

Furthermore, I found an interesting collection of different modern media used for teaching projects. It is called “Amazing web 2.0 projects book” and can be downloaded from the German server of Education (I´m not quite sure if this is a proper translation for “Deutscher Bildungsserver).
I can also upload it for you as a PDF-document on the document section of multiliteraciesberlin.

Kay