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=Scenario B: **Middle School Science Wikis**=

You have several seventh grade science classes collaborating on wikis. Students are divided into groups and are collecting information on each of the kingdoms of living organisms. The wikis are used to present the information, including some slide presentations and graphics your students have created. Your Monera kingdom group has been doing extremely creative work and has created an impressive presentation on bacteria.

The group has received a request by a teacher to use some of their graphics on bacteria cell structure for a project at a school in a nearby state. The students who created the work would get credit for their contribution, and the request is for two graphics out of over a dozen in the presentation.

How do you advise your students?

Provide your guidance below

There would be some preliminary steps we would take as teachers to ensure the safety of our students. We would congratulate the students on their hard work paying off and use the request as a teachable moment so the class can see how using open content benefits everyone. We would tell the students that we were going to contact the teacher first and make sure the person was safe to talk to. If the person seemed shady, and not legitimate, we would tell the students we did not think it was a wise idea to contact this person. If the person seemed legitimate, and we were able to verify his/her position as a teacher, we would offer to have our students make contact with him/her via skype from our classroom. Next, we would check the wiki license to be sure it allowed for sharing information.

Then, we would check with our principal and also clarify our school district's policy to make sure sharing would be permitted. If so, then we would let the students contact the teacher from our classroom (with us present) via skype. We would have already sent out a parent permission letter prior to beginning the wikis. However, this would only be permission for participating in the wiki. Therefore, we would first contact the parents to find out if they were ok with their children sharing their work. If the parents were ok, we would set up a time to skype the teacher and maybe his/her class. We would have our students ask how the graphics would be used. We would also have them ask the teacher to put their first name on it so they could get credit for their work. We would also make sure the students had not plagiarized the graphics. If they were a copy from another source, we would tell the students to share that source with the teacher, and give the appropriate source credit. Finally, we would encourage the teacher and his/her class to stay in touch and maybe develop a joint wiki learning project with his/her class.