Wetpaint+Wiki

= Communication Tool: Wetpaint = Group Members: Sara Fry-Miller, Mallissa Thomas, and Hillary Walsh

Brief introduction of the tool
Wetpaint is a social website where you can create your own sites and share your thoughts on other people’s sites. A social website is a website that anyone can edit and contribute to; it is great for collaboration, because many people in a group can share their ideas with each other. There are many features of Wetpaint that make contributing to a site very easy; the “EasyEdit Toolbar” allows you to easily add content or comment on sites.
 * ===//Advantages of the tool//===

The advantages to using Wet Paint as a communication tool in a K-12 classroom include the following: · Everyone in a particular class can be invited to contribute to the page, thus making communication between students and the teacher outside of class more EFFICIENT. · Discussions, photos, videos, news, and updates can be added to the page, ENHANCING the capacity for learning outside of class and also making teaching outside of the classroom more EFFECTIVE.
 * ===//Disadvantages (limitations) of the tool//===

The disadvantages to using Wet Paint as a communication tool in a K-12 classroom include the following: · The teacher will not have complete control over what is posted on the page if all students are invited to contribute. · If only the teacher contributes to the page, s/he will have complete control over what is posted, but then it will be only a one-way communication tool.

Application of the tool in your subject area
Wetpaint can be integrated into Early Childhood Education by teachers creating a site to teach a lesson on shapes. For instance, the teacher creates the page with numerous shapes on the page that are not labeled.The instructions are to label all the shapes on the page. The students would edit the page as a class. The teacher would be at the front of the class with the computer and the site would be projected onto a screen. The students would look at all the shapes and start to identify them. The teacher would then start to label the shapes with the students answers. In the end all the shapes would be labeled and the students would have successfully learned their shapes.

//List of key features showed in the ScreenToaster ://
This video talks about the basic purpose of Wetpaint Wikis, and how they can be useful in collaborating and sharing ideas with lots of other people. It emphasizes that they are easy, free, and fun.

Useful Resources
1.This site helps learn how to use wetpaint and create a webpage. This was used to help create the lesson plan on shapes. -http://www.wetpaint.com/page/Wetpaint-Features

2. Wetpaint Central (WPC) is acommunity for all users and fans of Wetpaint sites. -http://www.wetpaintcentral.com/

3. This is an example of a Wetpaint site created by an elementary school teacher so that she could share math lessons with other teachers. -[]