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Proposal:Outreach Research Packets for schools

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  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation



Summary

At all levels, schools are required to teach research skills to their students. I propose creation of an online 'research packet' that goes into detail about how to create wikipedia articles using appropriate sources. Give teachers the tools they need to run classroom projects for creating or upgrading articles that students worldwide use in the classroom.

Proposal

Create a site where .pdf's of teaching materials are available for different grade levels, through college and perhaps grad school.

  • Wiki Basics - Explain what wikipedia is and how it is used.
  • Wiki Example - Give an example of a Features Article and how it was created - step by step. Show that a stub can e improved to a start class, then a C-class and so on.
  • Wiki Classroom Project - Create a teachers guide to creating an article and editing it. Keep it as generic as possible so that the class can work together to create an article of their choice.


Motivation

Teachers are leary of allowing Wikipedia as source material for their assignments. If they have a hand in creating articles they will then have a stake in Wikipedia and perhaps a new mindset on its reliability. Wikipedia could gain editors and users in one step.


Key Questions

What age/class groups would this aimed at? (Age being relative in that anyone could take these off the web and use them. This question refers only to the grade level that a classroom project would be aimed towards.)

  • Basic for ages 12-14
  • Intermediate for ages 15-17
  • Advanced for ages 17-19
  • Expert for University ages and above.


Will this disrupt already existing articles.

  • Perhaps a new header could be constructed - along the lines of 'underconstruction' to allow for classroom projects to claim a 'start' or 'stub' level article for a short period of time.

Potential Costs

If hosted online there would be no materials cost.
If created by teacher volunteers there would be no creation costs.
Site hosting to hold the .pdf's and other materials would be a minimal cost.
It might be adventagous to hire education professionals to tie the research materials to national and state standards.


References

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