After searching a bit, I had incredible difficulty finding a wide range of wikis designed by art teachers. I did, however, find several of the same general type: a sort of home base for students and parents to gather information about the class. I had been hoping to find some wiki spaces that were predominantly constructed by the students–like in Vicki Davis’s class.
Mrs. Lee’s Art Classroom Webpage is a pretty straightforward wiki, it centralizes typical class paperwork like the syllabus and assignments, but also has a nice section to highlight a student of the week!
Custer Middle School has a pretty nice collection of wikispaces all linked to a main school page. Mrs. Heiser’s Art Class wiki is pretty great though! It has a whole bunch of links on the left side of the page that shows different unit material as well as some general resources like vocabulary and curriculum links.
AST’s Elementary Art wiki serves as a really great way to show parents what their students are up to, and also provides students an opportunity to see what older students are doing!
Finally, this wiki about a middle school’s Dragon Art unit is great because it does to a certain extent involve students in the process of constructing the content. As the introduction states, the students themselves decided that they wanted to do a unit on dragon art, and their teacher assembled some links and materials. Then the students began to work on their pieces, and updated their individual pages as they went–discussing not only their progress step by step, but also describing themselves and why their dragons looked the way they did. This seems like the best use of wiki pages in an educational sense, but the others were good for the reasons they were built for. I think, just like blogging, it’s important to be sure about who the audience is, and create content that’s appropriate.
MISTER SHIPLEY 