Wiki Workshop

Yesterday I help my first professional development that I titled “Wiki Workshop.” After over a month of planning my professional developments, the time finally came. I had every activity planned out to the minute.

First, I showed a couple of short video clips from Atomic Learning about what a wiki site is. This went well. Then I had brainstorming session about how wiki sites could be used at our school. Some great ideas were shared. Next, I showed three examples of wiki sites for educational purposes. At this point, I was on track time wise and everyone seemed engaged. The next part of the workshop was the point in which I was going to guide the participants to setting up their own wiki sites, or at least accounts on wikispaces.com. This is where the workshop was derailed. None of the teachers could connect to the internet from the laptops! Luckily, the network administrator was in the workshop and she was able to fix everyone’s laptops. However, the workshop was only planned to a one-hour workshop and it took around 10 minutes to get everyone’s laptops connected. While she was working on fixing the laptops, I continued on showing how to do it as much as I could, but I felt like I lost my participants’ attention mostly. Once everyone was connected, I tried to go over it again. It went better.

Before I knew it, the hour was over. I know that I do not like to stay longer at meetings than I am supposed to, so I wrapped it up. I had the participants fill the “Exit Passes” that I bought from Really Good Stuff. They wrote something they learned and something they still have a question about. This gave me valuable feedback. I found that although I was disappointed about the technology issues, the teachers still all wrote down that they learned what I wanted them to learn and the questions they still had were minimal. Therefore, I think the workshop actually went okay!