Just another brick in the wall?

We don’t need no education… Every time I heard someone mention Wallwisher without using it myself I seemed to have pink Floyd singing in my head. Wallwisher www.wallwisher.com is a great little web 2.0 tool principally for collaboration. You have a virtual wall where you can post little post it notes on to it although these are not like the normal yellow sticky notes you get as because they are online instead of just writing text you can add links to websites, images, music, audio podcasts and even videos.

How I used it was to basically get students at the beginning of the lesson as the starter to find out information on James Hutton & the rock cycle. Within a matter of ten minutes you had this awesome wall of information that contained video clips, text and all sorts of things. Students quickly began looking at what each other had posted and watching their videos. There then became a more competitive element where without any instruction they would begin to peer review each other’s information telling other students that looking at the source of their information then they had little confidence in the reliability of their post. This was fantastic to see and hear these conversations happening and all students were extremely engaged in the activity.

You can visit the example of the wallwisher we used last lesson below: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/jameshutton  It was really easy to use and set up. I created my own account which is free in a matter of a minute or two and then you go to ‘create a wall’ and follow the instructions. Here you give your wall a name and set the privacy level – I created my wall just before the lesson and so made it public so that anyone could comment on the wall this I felt would make it easier for students to access as I just gave them the website link and they could all add comments to it. After the lesson I then made the wall no longer public and so that no one else could comment on it.

I also recently observed another Science teacher at my school using it with a Separate Science year 11 set in the topic of Parasitism. When I asked Ollie Lee Head of Science about using it he said “The on-line page updates in real time this is great so that information can be shared in a lesson. Its useful for students researching new topics and also for group revision. I thought it is good that the access to the page can be restricted after the info has been put on so no one else can change it.”  I know other people have recently blogged about wallwisher too.

Ollie Bray spoke about a guy called Kenny O Donnell who has been doing some fantastic things with it in his grography lessons have a look at: http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/2009/09/wall-wisher-as-a-home-learning-activity.html  I now know why the song was going round and round, some of the lyrics have a relevance within the classroom today especially if you use Wallwisher as students can effectively collaborate in a creative way and the teacher can ‘leave those kids alone’ by acting just as a moderator or facilitator of the learning. Better still challenged your more able students by making them the moderator/facilitator whilst using it. So in some ways yes it is just another brick in the wall another tool for students to use to increase their own skills and help their own learning.