Making a list

A big shoutout to Doug Belshaw with this reference in his weekly newsletter.  The Wikipedia now allows you to create a playlist of resources found within its collection.  His example from the article was a playlist about New Literacies and you can check it out here.

Now, there was a time when Wikipedia was a four letter word but it’s matured into a self-curated system that has respect within education.  In fact, there’s so much respect in the online community that many search engines return the Wikipedia reference as the first result when you do a search.

So, I decided to make my own list.  What to do?  What to do?

You can’t drive around Essex County these days for very long before you see an advertisement for Kindergarten Registration.  This week is the big event for the little ones and their parents.  There’s my motivation!  I decided to create a playlist of the publicly funded options for parents.

It was a pretty simple process. 

Just start a new Wikilist, give it a title and a descriptor, search for articles within the Wikipedia, and add them to the list.  A partial search returns suggestions as you would expect.  Oh, and change the header colour to green of course.

The result?  You can check it out here – http://playlist.wiki/playlist/public-school-districts-in-essex-county

The list is nicely formatted, with an image from the resource and a direct link to the corresponding Wikipedia article.

The starting point, including some examples to other Wikilists can be found here.

In the classroom, the use is so obvious.  There are all kinds of ways to curate lists – why not make a Wikilist of your own for topics to share with others.  Of course, you’re encouraged to share your list here in the comments.