Wallwisher Update: A First Time User's Review

Wallwisher actually ended up making its way into my classroom today. Students thought it was a cool tool. They were excited about using it, and one sutdent even asked if I would leave it up for them to see for years after they were done with the class.

Today, I used it to segue into our final Writing as Activism project. I asked students to write stickies about all of the things they thought were going to be problems in the future. Many of them foresaw war, disease, obesity, and financial hardship in our future. Since they were all stuck in clusters, it was easy to see where ideas overlapped.

The one problem that we did have was that with 23 people trying to access the same board at once, things were running slow. For many of my students, error messages bogged them down and left them unable to participate immediately, or at all.

My students said that they are going to continue posting their ideas, as well as using Wallwisher in place of our Open Forum anonymous discussion board on Blackboard. This week, they are going to share their Halloween costume ideas and pictures! I promised I would share mine too.

I also think this will also be useful as place for them to share links, video, pictures, and research with one another for their final projects, as many of them are concerned with similar issues, such as government policy and public health.

Finally, I encouraged them to create their own walls, if they enjoyed using it in class, and link them up to our class wall. I'm curious to see who will do it and how active the wall will become.

I'm excited to see where this program takes classroom discussion, and I think I will be incorporating it more my future classes.