usefulwiki.com

With the technical setup ready and waiting, and some great content being added the time to announce the existence of usefulwiki.com to the world arrived in October.

First there was the Reinventing_Project-based_Learning book launch at a conference which Linda attended via skype, then an article written for Sharing best Practice by Linda which has caused a splash of interest. There have also been twitters and blogs, and some URL truncators from the Classroom Displays blog which is now piped into various LEA intranets.

Perhaps the most significant news for usefulwiki is that Linda is running a series of training courses for Teaching Assistants and putting all of her course notes on the wiki where students can access them between attendances at the LEA centre. This is what is called “eating our own dogfood”!

Thanks also to Geoff Dellow for creating the Recommended software for education page, which then inspired a Primary ICT page, which now needs to be completed together with one for secondary ICT. And so we begin to build, page by page, contact by contact.

The technical setup for usefulwiki is probably settled now for a while, and the main process is that of beginning to accumulate the first few sections of useful content, and the building of relationships and links with the first few individuals who are becoming inspired to contribute.

The wiki began with a section on Better Reading Partners , a scheme to encourage child readers who are mildly struggling.

To date we have some interesting notes on Project Based learning which arose from a conference seminar which Linda attended, the beginning of a very useful collection of resources on Practical Literacy Ideas and now some expert information and practical resources on the topic of Autism from “ultramum”.

There are several more new topics in the pipeline as well, with new people showing an interest in contributing some of their own resources, an act from which benefits both the contributor and the wider readership from now and into the future.