From the Classroom: Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool

Cobbled together a lab, teachers loved it, trouble was there was no fileserver. District has a “master plan”, but they currently don’t have fileservers. Tried pen drives, but that wasn’t optimal. Learned about wikis. Didn’t want it out in the public. District didn’t like to have servers on the premisis. Would need their own tech support. Ran across instiki. Teachers have ibooks, instiki is installed in there, they got a bit of training and configured it to use rendezvous. The work lives on the ibook, the teacher can close the book down and take the work home with them to review.

Teachers and students have been able to pick it up very quickly. When the teacher shuts down the work is safe. Problems are with the teachers laptop going to sleep, the laptop not being there when teachers are out.

What would be intesting? Having the lesson plan populate template pages for the class and each student. There is a student information silo however, this is a general problem with any tool you want to use in a school. SchoolTool is an open source project to create an admin platform for schools. Untimately aimed at developing world. Web services, hackable. Once you have the services open source tying together a wiki and the online admin info is simple.

SchoolBell is a calendar system for small groups of all types. It’s been pulled out of SchoolTool and released on it’s own.

Tags: etech2005