always learning

Back at Munich International School we used Atlas Rubicon curriculum mapping software. It was a very expensive package, and quite time consuming in terms of getting everything online (we spent about 2 years getting everything up and organized). But, it was great for me, as an IT facilitator, to be able to see, on a whim, what was going on in any subject at any time during the year. I found it a great resource to start planning projects and I relied on it constantly.

So, here at M’KIS, where we do not have Atlas, I have decided to start mapping our IT curriculum (thanks to the impetus of my tech director) using wikispaces. I’m just in the early stages now, and our Elementary and High School IT facilitators haven’t gotten started yet, but I’m already seeing huge advantages:

• Um, it’s free. That’s a pretty big one.
• It will allow force every teacher to start using web 2.0 tools to successfully do their job.
• Open access to all files makes it so much easier to collaborate, update, connect and share work.
• The linking, oh the linking! Being able to easily connect to completed student and teacher work is like a dream come true.

And the disadvantages:

• Tables. So far I have not figured out how to embed a good looking table in any wikispace. They always end up being all stretched out or all crammed up; bullets don’t seem to work; I can’t get the spacing in each row to work properly. And I love tables so much. This is a big dissappointment for me.
• General formatting issues. Sometimes things seem to turn bold and I can’t reverse it. I’m sure there is an easy way to solve this one, but it frustrates me, so I know it’s going to frustrate the teachers.

As I mentioned, this is a work in progress, but so far things are looking pretty good. Hopefully we will introduce the tool to our Curriculum Coordinator this week and we can get mapping all of the subject areas. Has anyone else tried curriculum mapping using wikis (or other web 2.0 tools)? How was it?

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