Qwiki Website Review for Teachers

Qwiki looks to be a lot of fun. The gist of it is that you click on a topic. A video/flash screen starts playing out the definition or description of the topic. Pictures flash across the screen, and text scrolls along the bottom of the screen, all while a voice (one that sounds like text-to-speech software) reads the text from the screen. Pros: You can see and learn about a topic (e.g., Lake Titicaca, cheetah, World War II) very quickly with a lot of pictures. Cons: The text-to-speech can be a bit off (oddly pronounced words*). The speech is read quite quickly (perhaps to keep each description to a minute or less), meaning that struggling readers may find it hard to keep up (if they try to read along). And honestly, the voice speaks so quickly that it was hard for us to keep up. In some of the descriptions we viewed, the presentations merely proved the point that complicated events (such as World War II) can never be properly explained in 60 seconds. Our Review and Rating: We are torn. Our guess is that students will generally like Qwiki, some teachers will like it, but most teachers will hate it. As teachers, we see ourselves hating it for the same reason we would have loved it as students. Picture it...the big World History exam days away. We (as students) have a giant list of terms to know. We go to Qwiki and enter each term. In a minute per term, we have enough superficial knowledge to pass the test with a decent grade. You may be thinking...but wait! You have hundreds upon hundreds of quiz games that test "superficial" and "trivial" knowledge! Yes, that's true. But we also have creative lesson plans, DBQs that launch thoughtful discussions, and much more. Qwiki has great potential as a teaching and learning tool, but we fear for students who zone out for the semester, use Qwiki to pass tests, and end up with little or no true comprehension.

*We have implemented text-to-speech software on our website as read-alongs to some of our images. We love using this software, but there are drawbacks. The software (no matter how good it is) never truly sounds human. And, no matter how good it is, there are a lot of words that are mispronounced. Often, when preparing a video or sound clip with text-to-speech software, we find ourselves scrambling to write terms and names phonetically so that the software will pronounce them correctly. With Qwiki (at least in its current version), it appears that programmers inputted the text without later checking the pronunciation. Hopefully, future updates will fix this bug.