In last week’s episode of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff Rushton shared a neat site called Naraview. Those who stayed on for the “overtime” of the webinar got a detailed overview of the service from one of its designers. If you missed it, here’s my overview of Naraview and its potential use cases in classrooms.

Naraview is a site on which you can create challenges for you students to connect topics through Wikipedia. The idea is that you give your students two topics and they have to click through Wikipedia articles to make the connections between the two topics. As the teacher, I can see the paths that students take to get from the starting article to the ending article.

Here’s an example of how Naraview works. I’ll give students the starting point of a Wikipedia article about Oxford County, Maine and the end point is the Wikipedia page about Abraham Lincoln. My students then need to click through a series of Wikipedia entries starting on the page about Oxford County to get to the entry about Lincoln. All of the entries that students click on are framed within Naraview so that students don’t have to exit to Wikipedia directly.

Applications for Education
The purpose of Naraview is to encourage students to think about and make connections between topics. Completing Naraview activities could be a good way to get students to make connections between current events and related historical events. Doing a Naraview activity could also be a good way for students to try to make cross-curricular connections between topics in science and math or between literature and history.