1. The “value added” for students through wiki activities is the opportunity to become deeply engaged with important but complex academic content, especially in math and science.
2. We might be able to begin yet this school year on a limited basis.
3. Focus on April and May 2006.
4. Focus on students learning challenging academic content standards.
5. Recruit teachers committed to the premise that all children can learn the content standards.
6. Recruit teachers who view the end of the school year as an ideal time to enhance student learning because yearly testing is complete.
7. Recruit teachers who choose to work with other teachers because doing so helps all children learn.
8. Ask these teachers what content standards are critical and essential for students to learn but are difficult for most students to learn.
9. Should the project occur at least in part in Ohio, suggest that teachers select grade level indicators and benchmarks that were not assessed this year but will be assessed next year through state testing even though they are to be taught this year.
10. Ask teachers to consider pre-testing students, if appropriate given the content, and use formative and summative evaluation to assess student progress.
11. Confer with them at least weekly and create opportunities for them to confer with one another in a variety of ways.
12. Consider selecting teachers who will use the “treatment” as well as teachers who plan to teach the same content but without students being directly engaged in wiki activities—constructing their own meaning as they respond to and edit wiki content or attempt to resolve problems presented though the wiki medium.

Two Examples
These examples apply to Ohio schools because these are the schools with which I am familiar. Other states should, of course, be included as well with adjustments made based on their content standards. The examples below are merely that—examples. I do not suggest that these examples represent important and challenging content standards. The teachers know which are most critical, essential, and challenging for students to learn.

Sixth Grade Math

1. Patterns, Functions, and Algebra is one of Ohio’s math content standards. It is addressed at each grade level, K-12, at an age-appropriate level.
2. Two of the sixth grade indicators for this standard involve students recognizing and generating equivalent forms of algebraic expressions and solving problems using these expressions.
3. An example of a problem would involve the formula for Rate X Time = Distance.
4. If 26 sixth graders took turns running the length of a football field and the results were gathered, the students could examine this data and reach a variety of conclusions.
5. The most important “ah-ha!” for the students to grasp is that, regardless of any individual’s rate and time, the product—100 yards—would be the same as every other student’s distance.
6. Therefore, A = B = C = etc. where each student is represented by a different letter.
7. The data could be graphed and may approximate a normal distribution with 68% being within one standard deviation of the mean, 13.5% two standard deviations above or below, 2.5% three standard…
8. Please keep in mind that this example is intended to merely suggest a starting point. The wiki pages would include more challenging problems with lings to resources such as www.rwlo.org, www.dropload.com, and www.portaportal.com.

Seventh Grade Science
1. Earth and Space Sciences is one of Ohio’s content standards and, as with all other content standards for math, science, language arts, and social studies, it is addressed at most grade levels, although there are grades for which there are no indicators—content to be learned—for a specific standard, such as earth and space sciences.
2. Seventh graders learn about weather, which is a complex subject that requires understanding atmospheric pressure, energy, temperature, moisture, and much more.
3. Students could be taught over a period of two weeks the basics of weather.
4. Some of the initial wiki challenges could be, “Why do you sometimes see your breath in cold weather?” and, “Why do you sometimes see vapor trails high in the sky from jet planes?”
5. The wiki engagement would prompt the students to think deeply about what they have learned and use their new learning to explain the phenomenon they observe in weather, such as thunderstorms, snow, clear skies, etc.
6. For the “take home final,” students could be presented with a comprehensive weather forecast and asked to interpret it and explain why, for example, a high pressure system is typically associated with fair weather—the high pressure evaporates visible moisture, stores heat energy, is denser, and heavier than a low pressure system, is more massive than a low pressure system, which accounts for the high pressure, and involves air moving clockwise from the center out and moving toward a low pressure system, which rotates counterclockwise and toward the center where air rises and, with reduced pressure and cooler temperatures, changes the phase of the moisture to visible moisture—clouds and precipitation.