Wikis are easy to set up and get going, there’s generally no login, sign up process.

They can be used as: a factual reference for students to use, a factual reference for students to create for others, a jumping-off point to a range of resources and activites, as a class-page, as a topic-page, as a digital portfolio, and for running learning processes or classroom activities.

They can be open to the public or closed (open only  to school or class or group members only).

A wiki can be seen as like a classroom – a place where you can bring things together, a scrapbook – a discussion forum, calendar, ning, widgets, youtube, flicker, teachertube can all be part of a wiki, thanks to  embeddable code.

wikispaces.com was the tool being promoted in this session at NECC.

(NECC is the computing and education conference I’m at currently in San Antonio, Texas)

Examples of teacher wikis and tutorials are on their site…. wikispaces.com

necc2008

educationalwikis.wikispaces.com

Coolcatteacher blogger, ICT extraordinaire,  Vicki Davis, took us through how she has been using wikis.

She has a classwiki at:

westwood.wikispaces.com

She has global project examples:

flatclassroomproject.wikispaces.com

horizonproject2008.wikispaces.com

digiteen.wikispaces.com

She thinks wikis are great as they are trackable (down to the comma).

During group work/projects – you can hold all students (strong, medium, weak, active, passive) accountable

You can use the history tab to see who is doing what. You can keep the class wikis closed and private or open them up.

Wikispaces.com wikis are ad-free for educators.

The classwiki can be a launch page, a place to start, course outline, projects, assignments, links, glossary, resources as files, embedded video links.

Each student can have their own portfolio wiki or e-folio.

Templates are available and ‘e-folio’ is one template choice. Students can then fill in info in the standard order.

Tagging.

Folksonomy is great but direct students to tag (each assignment should have a tag) so you can find all assignments easily. Markable work could have the tag ‘turn it in’

When students ‘edit’ each page – make them make a “NOTE” about the edit – so for every change they make you can see at a glance (in the history summary page) what they did on that edit.

Netbobs can be used to deliver an rss feed of all changes to the wiki to the teacher.

Teachers could create there own ‘personal learning network’ – a customised webpage that uses RSS to deliverswhat you needto see to a personalised webpage.

You can then subscribe to all edits on the wiki,and to all the discussions on the wiki, separately.

You can review action on wiki, you can see trouble brewing in groups.

A wiki is a gateway to the world, copying the embed code from sites like youtube is the first thing she teaches her students.

Two people can edit the same page at the same time. It can raise issues.

Advice – lock your assignment pages. The students could change your assignment!

Wikis make the idea of a “flat classroom” a reality. Students can work with a student across the room, in another class, in another year group, in another school, in another country.

Technopersonal issues.  Watch the online spaces – especially in the first day or so. Just be tough on the first day of class. But after that you should have less worries.

Unblocking/ blocking issues at some school – you can contact help @ wikispaces and they can get around most issues!

Blogs vs Wikis

Vicki sees Blogs as (on going discussions, journals, as daily and ongoing, news-like, opinion, reflection, 1st person, and useful for debate). Blogs are good for opinion. Wikis good for fact.

She sees wikis as  (evolving content, changing over time, for fact, the assignment). Wikis are for fact.

The future? Potential?  Collaborative Science may be the answer to the world’s problems. Wikis can pull in rss feeds, bookmarks. peer reviewers from all around the world can give feedback on a public blog.

Visit the websites hyperlinked in this post for more detail and to explore the potential of wikis for teaching and learning more fully.