Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Have you ever considered using Wallwisher in the classroom?

What is Wallwisher?

Wallwisher is an online notice board that is incredibly easy to use and also incredibly useful as a classroom tool!  Better still – it is an online collaboration tool to share ideas, resources, and thoughts on a particular topic.What I really like about it is that you can embed videos, photos etc. Best of all, your students don’t need an account in order to write on your wall.

How do you get started?
1.First of all go to http://wallwisher.com and sign up on the top right corner.

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2.Click on ‘Build a new wall’.

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3. From there you:
    1) Choose a background
    2) Choose a title and a sub-title
    3) Add a picture or choose one of their options
    4) Decide how you will treat the stickies.
        (It is often best to choose to moderate each sticky.)

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4. You even get to choose the name of your wall if you want to. This is then included in a web address for your wall.

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Your wall is now ready for use.

Some of the ways in which I have used Wallwisher in the classroom

1. I have used it for a brainstorm of story starters. Here the class was asked to think of some story starters. Wallwisher has a 160 character limit for each comment/post that you leave on the wall.

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2. It could be used for reflection purposes. Here the class reflects on the Soccer World Cup that was held in South Africa in 2010.

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3. It can be used to gather a collection of facts about a topic. Here I used it with a Grade 3 class to recall facts about dinosaurs.

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Ways in which others have used Wallwisher in the classroom

1.  It could be used for Maths resources. Here is a geometry wall.  (http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/Geometry9)

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2. It could be used as a way of answering a test question as the student cannot see each others’ answers until you have moderated the stickies. (http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/isthistory)

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3. It could be used as a grammar lesson or a writing lesson. Give the class a basic sentences and the students have to expand on the sentence.

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4. Here it is used to brainstorm Web 2 tools suitable to use for English students
(http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/teachersweb20)

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5. Ways of using wallwisher in a classroom presented on a wallwisher!
(http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/ineducation)

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Further ideas
1. Gather information from a wide source of people.
2. Use Wallwisher for book reviews.
3. It can be used as a suggestion box for changes that need to be made about something.
4, It is a way of sharing resources with one another.

Posts written about Wallwisher

1. 105 ways to use wallwisher in the classroom:  http://seanbanville.com/2010/06/26/wallwisher-105-classroom-ideas/
2. 32 ways to use wallwisher in the classroom from Tom Barrat - http://bit.ly/rM7a1x
3. Loads of wallwisher resources here: http://www.freeeslmaterials.com/wallwisher.html
4. Using Wallwisher together with Fotobabble
http://tefltecher.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/talking-photographs/

Embed Wallwisher in a blog
One of the great things about Wallwisher is that it can be embedded in a blog or wiki quite easiy. To add any type of object that uses HTML embed code into a post it is as simple as this:
  1. Grab the HTML embed code
  2. Click on the HTML tab of the blog or wiki
  3. Paste the HTML embed code
  4. Click on Publish
Video tutorial
Learn more in this video tutorial from Learnitin5
http://youtu.be/Gyhwj2BP8F8



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