Technology Inquiry Wiki Reflection

My Wiki!

     I exerted quite a bit of effort, over a span of many months, on this course task. I spent many days finding what I thought were appropriate informal and formal resources and writing my annotated bibliography. Right away I knew what additional resources I wanted to include, so I added these to my wiki. I then spent many days writing my introduction and best practices section of my wiki. Once I had this completed, I worked on the screencast. As usual, the screencast was probably the most difficult part of the entire task, probably because I am a bit of a perfectionist. I only had to record my screencast about 8 times, which is a step up from my previous experience with Jing.
 
     I really learned a lot from this inquiry wiki assignment. I not only learned how to help my niece (and other students with autism spectrum disorder) use technology to learn and grow, I also learned how to work a wiki. Wikispaces was not always cooperating with what I wanted, but overall, I am happy with the wiki that I came up with.

     This task was a very valuable experience for me as a teacher and as an individual. Through this assignment, I learned more about autism spectrum disorder, technologies that help students with autism spectrum disorder, and how to set-up a wiki. I am now more familiar with wikispaces, and would be ready to use wikispaces in my own classroom. Before this task, I had heard of and read about wikispaces and wikis, but I never actually created one. I now understand some of the functions and limitations on wikispaces and am more knowledgable about this tool. As a future teacher, I will need to try out technologies before assigning my students to use them; this course task helped me to experiment with a wiki and learn about it, before I get into my own classroom and set up a classroom wiki or have the students make wikis.