Tapping into the best learning style

It's the end of the year and I'm knee deep in teaching Force & Motion.  I usually try and save this for the end of the year because it is highly engaging content even though kids think they'll die with all the math.  Lots of moaning and groaning when I tell them that physics uses the language of math to explain how things move!!!!

Unfortunatley we don't have enough time to really discuss cool, but only related material to F & M.  right now we're using Lego Robotics to study gears.  Specially how gears can make the TankBot go faster or slower depending on what gears you install.  I use these because the kids love robotics.

I thought one way I might continue this conversation is to use a wiki for expanding their ideas.  On the wiki I thought I'd put all the things you might expect to see in a F & M unit....Newton's laws, motion, speed, work, simple machines...but then I'd have a separate section of Robotics.  So I went in search of cool things on robots and Mars is the natural choice.

I called the page...Fact or Fiction??? and then hyperlinked to Mars rover animation.  With 4 hours, almost 300 comment flooded into the wiki.  Because I'm also trying to teach them how to actually have a conversation they did a pretty good job making reasonable comments.

Here's the thing..............they loved using this format for their learning.  They spent hours online last night and could hardly wait to see what new treasures I brought them to see tonight (can you tell me about the 7 minutes of terror???)  As we near bedtime on the second night of the conversation, they logged almost another 200 comments.  What teacher wouldn't be thrilled if even half of these comments were good one and that kids were busy talking to each other about space exploration????

As I reflect on my choice of using a wiki, maybe I made the wrong 2.0 choice.  I probably should have used a blog and then worked on creating threads.  I will consider this when I finish....and a good friend suggested that I accumulate some of the conversation and then have student summarize what was said.  I think that was a great suggestion.