About Maria Batkovic Expertise I can answer any question concerning primary grade (K-3rd) education from the perspective of the student, parent or teacher. My speciality was designing highly creative ways to teach all levels of reading, writing, spelling and math (addition, subtraction, multiplication and fractions). In the last few years, I also became very adept at dealing with students with learning disabilities integrated into mainstream classrooms.
Experience I taught 2nd grade for more than 25 years in Catholic schools in New York City and Northern California.
Expert: Maria Batkovic Date: 2/9/2008 Subject: AllExperts - Question
Question I am a teacher in VA. I am trying to incorporate technology into my classroom. I read about two technological tools recently: blogs and wiki (such as wikipedia).
1) I was wondering how we can use blog in an educational setting?
2) Should I allow my students to use wikis as valid sources for academic research? Can I allow my students to submit a paper to that cites a wiki as a source? What policies could wikis enforce that could garner more confidence from the public?
I believe that students should know how to do research both on the computer and books, periodicals, encyclopedias etc. Some teachers feel that wikipedia and the like are not necessarily great sources of exact information.
I think policies have to be developed school wide. Discussions within the faculty should take places in order to develop a consistent policy on all grade levels.
