Capstone+Essay+Walt+Smith

SITM 2011 Capstone Project Review Walt Smith Creating A Wiki Support Site for Catechists & Parents Before participating in SITM 2011, my understanding of digital catechesis was limited to utilizing search engines to look for pictures, scripture readings and the occasional article that I would quote from in my bulletin column, or add to a seasonal newsletter. The opportunity to create a page that would offer my catechists, parents and students the venue to discover and develop their faith life in ways they had not experienced before seemed like a dream. My dream was to utilize wikispaces.com and create a page where resources for parents could be posted. Projects, developed and created by our students could be worked on and then viewed by all our families. Catechists could give their input on our calendar, progress of their class and ideas for extra-curricular activities for our students and families, and parents could keep track of what their child was working on in his/her class. This tool would open up Life Foundations to a new, exciting venue of faith learning. As with most dreams, this one very quickly reminded me the meaning of the phrase “rude awakening”. The creation of the page was made easier by our work in SITM2011. I gained the understanding of using Wikispaces as a resource, as well as several other cloud based applications, including [|Wordle], [|Glogster], [|Animoto] and Wordpress. The rude awakening I experienced was that the catechists and the parents loved the idea of having resources for the students to look at, but their work and family schedules made it almost impossible to hold a training class and parents complained that the projects their children were asked to participate in outside of Faith Formation added to the load of homework that already weighed them down. What I was __pleasantly__ surprised by – though I shouldn’t have been - was the desire, understanding and willingness of the children to bring these new technologies into __their__ catechetical development. The time needed to familiarize all the parties involved became a quite daunting task. Obviously I had missed a step from the inception of the dream and the application of the tools. That step was buy in from all parties involved. As in all new ideas and methods, there needs to be a common goal and agreement on action to be taken to achieve the goal. The first order of business was to look at the common understanding and desire of parents, catechists and students to utilize new ideas and techniques towards greater understanding and expression of faith. The goal probably should have been to __introduce__ our catechist and teachers to digital catechesis, not throw them in and ask them to swim right away. The good news from all this is that our children were ready to jump in, albeit in the setting of a few special Digital Catechesis Nights that were lead by yours truly. Those evenings, and their projects, will form the basis for round two. Spes est!