First Thanksgiving Curriculum Page

Click here to view my curriculum page!

I have heard quite a bit about curriculum pages in my other classes, but I have never created one of my own so I was excited when I learned we would be creating a curriculum page for class this week. The tool used for the curriculum page was a wiki, and the wiki will be developed over the next few weeks. Luckily, last semester I took a course in which I completed an extensive group research paper using a wiki. That was my first experience with a wiki, and I learned a lot about how to navigate it. I decided to use Wikispaces for my curriculum page, as that was the wiki site I used in my last experience.

Last week, I brainstormed an idea for a digital storytelling project and planned each area of the project for my second grade students. I decided to run with that idea, as I had already “storyboarded” it out. “Why reinvent the wheel?” as is the common theme in education. Therefore, my curriculum page was designed around the idea of my second graders creating their own digital stories about the First Thanksgiving. Students have to choose a side to take: Native Americans or Pilgrims. Stories must be told from the chosen point of view. Not only do I think these stories would be fun for students to create, but they would be fun to grade as well! While we do not have to have the rubric created for our curriculum page quite yet, I am thinking of creating a teacher and student rubric so the students have a part in evaluating, also. Students could evaluate each others’ projects with a peer-evaluation rubric. That would be a great way to get students looking for important qualities of digital projects and keep them involved in every presentation.

Before I began creating the actual curriculum page, I took some time to research some quality kid-friendly web resources on the First Thanksgiving. I wanted to make sure the provided sites included images and videos, as well as text, so this was not as easy a task as this might sound. Once I found a few sites I liked, I wrote a brief description for each site in Microsoft Word and saved it. (I am a saving-addict ever since the time my computer randomly restarted and I lost a project I had been working on for three hours.) Once I had my sites, I began building the rest of the curriculum page in Microsoft Word, too. I am extremely familiar with Microsoft Word and its formatting, so I did most of the planning and creating there. When I had all the material for the project planned out, it was time to put it in the wiki.

While I have experience using a wiki, boy did I struggle with the formatting aspect of Wikispaces. I copied the entire Word document and pasted it into Wikispaces. However, when I wanted to center and bold the headings, it would not simply do what I was commanding it to do. Instead of just bolding the two-word heading, it would bold the heading and the following two lines of regular text. Then, when I tried to correct it the actual heading would not center or stay bold, but the regular body text would not become unbold! This was extremely frustrating, and I think I spent an hour just trying to center and bold specific text. This was the most frustrating part of process for me. However, I soon found a solution! If I formatted everything, and I mean everything from line spacing to text bolding, in Microsoft Word, I could paste it into the Wiki and it would keep its formatting. This was very helpful to learn because in the beginning, I was pasting the information from Word with basic formatting, but I was then attempting to format more in the actual Wikispaces domain. I did not enjoy formatting in Wikispaces at all, and I would not recommend it.

I would recommend using a wiki for curriculum pages, though, as it is able to be modified and added to easily. I am looking forward to adding the final pieces to the project, such as a rubric and sample project. As I continue to create my curriculum page and add to my wiki, it is important that I keep in mind my audience, second graders, and I don’t make the project too complicated. I could definitely see how it would be easy to overwhelm students with too much going on within a curriculum web page. While I do not have a bunch of flashy stuff on my curriculum page for my second graders, I must admit that I was quite proud of myself when I got the picture on the page as it really seems to bring the page to life J.