This is the assignment I have always wanted to be forced to do. As an educator, I have seen “gaps” in what teacher and student resources are out there and many times have thought, “I wish I knew how to just make exactly what I want,” and now I do!

One of the challenges to creating this web guide was that it took an excruciating amount of time as I had to learn everything from scratch as I went, having never created a website or video before. Now that I have a good grasp of what I am doing, I am equipped to create more of these guides and videos for our school in an efficient timeframe.

A further challenge I found specific to this assignment was the word count. There was more I would have liked to have developed. I would have preferred to more comprehensively address reasons why to use wikis, and concerns I think teachers might have about using one if they are not convinced or confident. I ended up having to delete out a fair amount of content to reduce my word count. I also had to significantly reduce my content on digital citizenship, deleting out several of my examples that I felt took the content deeper. Unfortunately, this also had to be done on my video, to shorten it. I had to altogether skip the video on how to sign in to Wikidot after spending time making it. It was difficult to balance out guiding teachers in both wikis and citizenship but I knew this web guide was perfect for what our school needed now.

The last challenge I faced was a good one. I knew I wanted to develop this guide because for the first time the Year 7 classes at my school are going to create a wiki in response to literature circles. I wanted my guide to be relevant to them but broad enough that any of the teachers in the high school could use it. I was thankful for the challenge as it stretched my ideas about how a wiki could be used and helped me to see how digital citizenship can be embedded in everything we do online with students.