Famous Psychologists Wiki Website

As many of you are aware, the latest revision (May 2010, May 2011) of the AP Psychology Course Description book, commonly referred to as the "Acorn Book", includes listings of famous psychologists in almost all of the unit descriptions. Throughout the course of this past school year many of us have gone to great lengths to include these psychologists in our AP Psychology units and assessments.

As we rapidly approach the day of the 2010 AP Psychology Exam, I was looking for a way for students to study/review these famous people from the history of psychology. Last year I had students in my AP Psychology classes form study groups to create Wiki outlines of the fourteen AP Psychology units (http://teachinghighschoolpsychology.blogspot.com/2009/05/wiki-pages.html). My students seemed to find the outlines very helpful. This year I would like to expand the idea to the famous psychologists and beyond my school.

I have created a Wikispace page of famous psychologists at http://famouspsychologists.wikispaces.com waiting to be completed by AP Psychology classes from throughout the United States and possibly the world. My hope is many of you AP Psychology teachers and students will join forces to create a fantastic review tool. Together I'm betting we can create the world's largest AP Psychology study group.

Please take some time out of your busy schedule to visit the Famous Psychologists Wiki page and see if you and/or your classes would like to help with the project. I could see this as a great one or two day lesson in your classes as they prepare for the AP Psychology Exam. I am sure students will be excited about having your name and school name included on the Wiki site.

Lastly, as this is the first time I am taking on this type of adventure, please be patient with all those technological problems that I know are going to happen. It is one thing to try something of this nature with my students knowing when (not if) something goes wrong they will understand I am learning right along with them. It is a completely different thing to do the same in front of my peers throughout the country. I thank you in advance for your help and patience.

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Wiki Pages

I took a slightly different twist on Wikis than Rob is proposing in the previous posting. When someone mentions wikis most people's thoughts turn to Wikipedia, the online free encyclopedia. A wiki, as defined by Wikipedia, is "any website that uses wiki software..." The key to most wikis is the software used and collaborative nature of the work. I wanted to take this concept and apply it to a group project for my AP Psychology students.

For many, many years, just prior to the AP Psychology Exam, I had my students work in groups to create review outlines of the various AP Psychology units. These outlines were then reproduced for everyone to use in their preparations for the exam. Students found the project very useful. For me the activity was, as most group projects are, a bit difficult to grade as you could never tell who was truly responsible for what. In addition, it was very hard to quickly reproduce the needed copies for over 125 students.

This year, rather than create paper reviews outlines, the students created electronic wiki outlines. Wikispaces (one of a number of companies that provides this service) at http://www.wikispaces.com provides free wiki space for teachers. Students worked on their outlines by going to the website, making needed changes right on the main document.

The site allows me to restrict membership to just my students and tracks all changes made to each page. I could look at the history page for each outline and see exactly what each student did. I must admit I still had some problems distinguishing who did what as some groups delegated the task of uploading all the material to the wiki page to one student. The site even includes a discussion page which some students used to work out problems they were having with the wiki word processor.

The activity was far from problem free and I have a number of changes for next year. Please contact me at kkorek@germantown.k12.wi.us if you are interested in hearing about those or for more information on the wiki outline project. For the first time through, I felt the project was successful enough to warrant repeating next year.

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