Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors.

Recently, university teachers have swapped student term papers for assignments to write entries for the free online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is an “open-source” web site, which means that entries can be started or edited by anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

Writing for Wikipedia “seems like a much larger stage, more of a challenge,” than a term paper, said professor Jon Beasley-Murray, who teaches Latin American literature at the University of British Columbia in this western Canadian city.

“The vast majority of Wikipedia entries aren’t very good,” said Beasley-Murray, but said the site aims to be academically sound.

To reach its goal of academic standards, said Wikipedia’s web site, it set up an assessment scale on its English-language site. The best encyclopedia entries are ranked as “Featured Articles,” and run each day on the home page at www.wikipedia.com.

To be ranked as a “Featured Article,” Wikipedia said an entry must “provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.”

Of more than 10 million articles in 253 languages, only about 2,000 have reached “Featured Article” status, it said.

As an experiment, last January Beasley-Murray promised his students a rare A+ grade if they got their projects for his literature course, called “Murder, Madness and Mayhem,” accepted as a Wikipedia Featured Article.”

Read the entire article.

A recent study in England reveals that more bacteria can be found on some computer keyboards than on a toilet seat. The study was conducted in an office, where it might be reasonable to assume that a keyboard is used by just one person most of the time.

This got me thinking about our keyboards at school. Six or seven students might use a keyboard each day, coughing, sneezing, and typing with fingers that may or may not have been washed after they went to the restroom. Those keyboards are wiped down once a year, in the summer. In contrast, the custodian goes through the restrooms every evening with some powerful cleaners.

I’d hate to see that British test replicated at my school. I think the results would probably be the same.

I’m going to invest in disposable disinfectant wipes and encourage students to clean the keyboards at least once a week. I’ll set them out where students can get to them easily. If they wipe them down often enough, it will help.

And if I encourage them to read the article, maybe they’ll get between the keys!

(After reading the article and writing this blog, I had to stop and wipe down my home keyboard. This summer I’m taking it apart and cleaning it thoroughly. Yuck!)

Think Aloud is a reading strategy designed to model the way good readers “think through” a text to understand it. It’s often used for remediation in middle and high school classrooms.

Greece Central School District in North Greece, New York, has established a rich repository of instructional strategies and resources, and Think Aloud is one of them.

From the site:

Many of us developed our skills as readers implicitly, by simply doing a lot of reading of all sorts of texts; after all, reading is a passion for us. Therefore, when we teach reading at the secondary level, we need to keep in mind that we must take what we know and do implicitly and make it explicit for our students, especially for our struggling readers.

This strategy underscores the importance of modeling reading for our students. When I begin “The Fall of the House of Usher,” I use this approach because I know Poe’s style intimidates readers — sometimes even strong readers. It help to pause and think now and then, to reflect and predict. By the time the house collapses, students are comfortable using this approach on their own.

The message in my inbox was succinct: “Spellingcity.com. It’s new. It’s cool.”

And it is. Spelling City offers kids up to about 8th grade a variety of ways to interact with words: they can hear them, drag and drop letters to spell them, and play games like Hangman as practice. Teachers can type in their own spelling lists and save them so that class time isn’t spent on random words.

I tried typing in some SAT-level words, and Spelling City objected. The site is still being developed, so down the road it may be ready for words like mendacity. In the meantime, it’s open for business. If you teach traditional spelling units, this site could be your new best friend!

Chris Avenir, a freshman at Ryerson University in Toronto, needed help with a chemistry class. He wasn’t alone: the Facebook study group he joined eventually had 146 other members, all helping one another with problems assigned in class. The online exchange was comparable to study groups meeting in college dorms and libraries everywhere. Avenir eventually became an administrator for the site, and things went well enough that he finished the class with a B.

Over the holiday break, however, the professor discovered the site, changed Avenir’s grade to an F, charged him with 147 counts of academic misconduct, and recommended that he be expelled. The professor says that Avenir cheated.

Although 146 other students also participated on the site, only Avenir is in trouble for this. On Tuesday he is to appear before the engineering faculty appeals committee to plead his case.

According to the Toronto Star, the questions were worth 10% of a student’s grade in the course, and “the professor [had] stipulated the online homework questions were to be done independently” — even assigning different questions to different students to discourage collaboration.

“We are not a bunch of old farts who are afraid of technology,” stated James Norrie, director of the Toronto university’s School of Information Technology. “The [academic honor] code is clear that someone who enables others to cheat will receive a severe penalty.”

But is an online study group cheating? By all accounts, Avenir and others limited their help to hints and reminders about process. “If this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in tutorials,” Avenir said.

What’s so troubling about this is that they have decided to throw the book at one student — a guy who didn’t even start the study group — and let the other 146 students off the hook completely.

Facebook is getting the press, but it’s not the issue. Either 147 people violated the honor code, or no one did.

Here’s another terrific resource: Loud Lit.

The site features audio files of children’s lit, short stories, poems, novels, even a little nonfiction. All texts are in the public domain; here are some samples:

• “Rapunzel”
• “The Raven”
• “To Build a Fire”
• The Gettysburg Address
• Heart of Darkness

Listening to audio files can help all students appreciate literature. Sometimes listening to a clip of just a few minutes can help with comprehension or with understanding an author’s tone. This can serve as scaffolding or as enrichment, as pre-reading or post-reading.

And your students could produce them, too. What a terrific experience that would be for them!

Thanks — again! — to Kevin Jarrett of ncs-tech.com!

In the United States, ninth grade is often the year students are introduced to Shakespeare, and the play of choice is Romeo and Juliet. The unit is usually second only to the research paper in terms of difficulty; it’s just so hard to read the English Shakespeare crafted 400 years ago.

I tell my students that reading Shakespeare is like listening to a wonderful song on the radio as you are driving out of range of the station: you can tell it’s a great song, but the static makes it difficult to appreciate the music.

The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project has developed The Interactive Folio for Romeo and Juliet. This wonderful resource really helps break through the static. On the left is Shakespeare’s text, hyperlinked. Click on a link, and to the right you will see support — a paraphrase, an explanation, a picture, audio, or video. Students can read straight through where they feel confident. When they need help, click! It’s there.

While the interactive folio is currently the “star” in my book, don’t stop there. There are links to several projects that bring Shakespeare to 21st-century students of all ethnic backgrounds. Don’t miss the Learning Commons for ready-to-use activities.

Somewhere there is a student who thought she was going to hate Shakespeare. She’ll use this site and think, “Wow, this is cool. Shakespeare is cool!”

Describe your life in six words!

That’s the premise Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser work with in a recent article in the LA Times. They recount the famous Ernest Hemingway tale, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Hemingway’s piece, of course, was fiction. Smith and Fershleiser invite readers to submit autobiography. You can read some of the models at their site. (My favorite is by Jancee Dunn: “ABCs MTV SATs THC IRA NPR.”)

I could see a creative writing class working on this, and it would certainly encourage students to be concise. I could also see it as a book report (write Jay Gatsby’s life story in six words) or as a prewriting task before a character analysis. It might ask too much of very young writers, but should work well with high school and older.

If you try this, let me know how it works!

It’s hard to keep track of all the new tools being developed using Web 2.0 interactivity — a new one seems to pop up almost daily. Kevin Jarrett, an elementary teacher and certified Google Educator, does a good job on his blog, NCS-Tech. I am always amazed at his ability to find all these wonderful resources, take them for a test drive, and then blog about them.

Dawn Hogue, a teacher in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, recently developed a terrific site on why blogs and wikis are valuable in the classroom. She includes models of educational blogs and wikis as well as links to video files that are already considered “classic” among teachers who use these tools.

Part of our job as educators is to prepare the way for the successful integration of this approach as we move toward a 21st century curriculum. Parents may equate classroom blogging with the stuff that takes place on Facebook and MySpace. You and I know that’s like comparing filet mignon with hamburger, but we need to convince them. After all, some of these parents are the legislators who fund the technology programs.

So Kevin, thanks for showing us all these great resources! And Dawn, thanks for the support as we explain why we need to go this way — because the kids are already there.