kp+Wiki

The wiki that I chose to put in my portfolio is one that I take great pride in. I spent five hours strait on this wiki in order to earn enough carrots for an A. I had no idea when I started this wiki that I would go above and beyond and end up writing enough for at least two if not three A+ work wikis. My wiki focused on all 207 bones in the adult human body. In class we were learning about all the bones in the body. Each class we had a hard quiz (if you just looked over the material and didn't study) that focused on specific sections of the human skeleton. An example of this would be the skull. We had to know all of the cranial and facial bones for one quiz. Sometimes we had to identify what type of bone they were or what they did. It was difficult.

My wiki went over all of the bones into great detail. Each section had a picture to go along with what I was saying. I focused on all aspects of the body. I even found cool facts that I never knew before. A good example of this is that the hyoid bone is the bone that breaks when a person is strangled. I started from the top of the skull, from the axial skeleton down to the hips down to the legs and feet. I never knew how many bones were just in one hand or one foot. Its amazing to know that babies have way more bones than us and that a bunch of their bones fuse together to make one big and highly functional bone.

I thought learning all the bones would not be fun at all...or easy for that matter. I am one of the people who have the worst memory that anyone could possibly imagine. When my English teacher gave us quizzes on vocabulary I tried as best as I could and I still did horrible. Until this year I couldn't memorize anything to save my life. My teacher, Mr. Orr, made it interesting for me to learn the bones. He had us go onto the computer and view this site called anatomy 360 which showed us all views of each bone. It also told us what the bone was for and how it fit into the human body. He'd assign a specific section of bones each night then give us a quiz on them the following class (which wasn't hard because our long and tedious homework drilled the information into our brains). On these quizzes you would either do really good or bad. By having me learn all of the bones at a steady pace and a way that I could understand Mr. Orr significantly helped me prepare for my huge wiki assignment. He graded our wiki by using these things called "carrots". For each little thing you did you received a given amount of carrots. Say I added a picture onto my wiki. I would then get two carrots. He made the grading very clear as well. He said 50 carrots was an A and so on and so forth. He even provided extra credit for the wiki. I thought this wiki was another way to keep us occupied. It turned out to actually make me interested to see how many carrots I could gain. The more work I did, the more carrots I gained, the more I learned and the better grade I got. It was a win win win win situation in my eyes. My wiki ended up being very long with a lot of links to other places and pictures to help show what I was talking about. By doing this project I went over all of the bones that I had thought that I already learned and retaught myself over. I found a way to remember all the bones because I was making a wiki that others would be viewing. I had to put all of the information down in a way that everyone who viewed the wiki would understand.