A Teacher’s Thoughts

Online science fairs have been popping up frequently lately. And for good reason. Students have an opportunity to see a variety of projects grow and develop, and potentially an opportunity to collaborate on similar projects. Last year our local chamber of commerce started a science fair for grades 7-12. The turnout was good with a number of schools represented, including some party crashers from an elementary school (they can do science too!). This was a good place to start. I spent a little time looking around. I know that Shaun Fletcher is working on developing an online science fair for his students and I found a globally collaborative science fair wiki through Britt Gow in Australia. Both of these projects seemed great and worth joining. However there are about 400 of us looking for an online home. While I would like to have my students work on a globally collaborative project things just didn’t pan out. We had five local teachers who agreed to collaborate, the timing was off and well, suddenly having to manage a site with that many students isn’t something I would just want to throw on someone.

Management has been relatively easy. A couple of us are pretty good at going through all the pages, members, and discussions to keep an eye on things. This is definitely a group effort though, as of this writing there are currently 957 discussions on over 300 projects. Here are some of the things I did to make things more manageable.

1. Create a projects page containing a tag cloud and menus with automatic links to pages with pre-defined tags. This way each teacher has a predefined tag. Each student for that teacher is asked to use that tag on his/her page. The result is easy to find pages! The tag cloud will allow students to find similar projects or projects of interest after students have tagged their pages.
2. Use a template for new student pages. I made the template follow the outline of the steps of the science fair. This kept the students on track as they moved forward.
3. Delete, Delete, Delete. When there were few kids I would conference with students before deleting something. Now I mail them a message stating what was being deleted and why. The purpose of my message is to inform but also to instruct.
4. Image Policies
   • Link to external URLs whenever possible
   • When uploading files, always start the file name with your username. This prevents overwriting of files (how many kids do you think will name a graph, graph.gif?) and makes it easier to find files later.
   • Keep images less than 400px x 400px. This saves layout and disk space.

Related posts:

Science Fair Wiki and Science Standards

Reflection on Students’ First Wiki Experience