Romana Kolar, Zavod za gluhe in naglušne Ljubljana, Ljubljana
Have you ever faced the problem, when you knew that the student was capable to perform a task, but he could not do it in front of other peers. Perhaps you even knew why he cannot do it. Was he afraid to be mockery of his peers or he didn’t want to stand out from others. We have lots of that kind of students in our High School Institute for the Deaf in Ljubljana. In our high school we have deaf students, hard of hearing students, students with autism spectrum, students with speech and language disorder and many other disabilities in every class. In this paper, I would like to present different possibilities to use Wikispaces classrooms for our students to become more responsible and independent when it comes to learning and studying. What is more, I wanted to accomplish the recognition of individual student. As a teacher in those classes, I was coping with the problem, how to encourage certain student to cooperate at my lessons. I knew that he had lots of knowledge but he didn’t want to present it and share it with others, because he was afraid of being laughing at. I had presented them possibilities of creating Wikispaces classroom, even more, they’ve got an assignment in which they had to present the topic given and they had to explain it in a way that all other students would understand. They had to answer the questions and prepare extra papers and explanations. The results were unexpected. Almost all of my students took this assignment very seriously. They did the research about the topic and all the things they had to do. Not only me but also other students have noticed that the student with problems I have mentioned, did his job excellent. Students contributed many questions at his e-classroom and he answered them very regularly. Students bond even more in this project. They exchanged ideas, they talked about the questions and as a future IT operators, they evaluate the Wikispace. They conclude that they would definitely need more events like this one.
