Wiki for educators
When you use a wiki, your students get a gentle introduction into online collaboration, and they'll remain engaged beyond the classroom. As Mike Lawrence, Executive Director of CUE, noted: "When students write a paper, they're usually writing for one person: their teacher. When students know their peers will read what they write, students care and they try harder." Whether for teachers, students, parents or administrators, most wiki use falls within one of the following categories.
Organizational and administrative use
Wiki can be effective for coordinating between school administrators, teachers, and organizations such as PTA and alumni groups. Wiki can be used to document day-to-day work or collaborate on larger projects such as fundraisers. This type of use is very similar to the internal use of wiki by corporations, but it may additionally be used for getting feedback and increasing accountability to outside groups and individuals such parents and the district.
As a virtual classroom
For teachers and students, using wiki as a virtual classroom has powerful benefits. Students can collaborate on group projects or work individually. Teachers can give assignments and feedback on student work. Wiki creates a group space for this all to happen, and opens up this work to easy development outside the confines of the school day. As an additional perk, wiki solves the "dog ate my homework" problem by providing an easily accessible space that documents the complete history of any changes made to a page.
Benefits for each group involved in the education process
For parents
- Communicate with school staff.
- View student progress, either in everyday work or grading/testing results.
- Organize with other parents for activities such as PTA.
For teachers
- Develop curriculum either individually, within departments, or interdepartmentally.
- Make that curriculum viewable by parents, students and administrators.
- Coordinate with school administrators.
- Give students assignments and feedback.
For students
- Complete individual work, either from home or in the classroom. The benefit of using wiki for individual work over traditional methods is its visibility to parents, peers, and teachers; completed content is visible instantly once the "save" button is used. Higher education has even used the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as a tool for creating class work: professors have assigned the creation of encyclopedic articles. Using a school's own wiki for this purpose is much more effective, as exterior wikis such as Wikipedia each have their own criteria for inclusion of content.
- Collaborate in and out of the classroom on group projects.
- Get help at home on assignments. Using a wiki allows feedback and help for students to be provided outside the stricture of a school day, doing what call in help lines, public access television and private tutors have done, except at a potentially faster pace.
- Form alumni organizations.
- Develop wiki skills for work in the wider "wikiverse". These two links (a news story and a Slashdot discussion thread) concern directing students to edit Wikipedia. Much debate about Wikipedia and education revolves around the reliability of Wikipedia; this story demonstrates a different approach, in which students develop their writing skills by writing for a wide audience.
Pros
- Collaboration
- Flexibility
- Accountability: both to outsiders such as parents and within the classroom.
- Increases student engagement
- Domain hosting can be free or low cost: either with exterior sites or in your url.
- No reliance on school IT personnel.
- Safety: who has access to your wiki is in your hands. When used correctly, wikis do not pose the danger to minors that social networking sites such as MySpace can.
Cons
- Having to teach wiki to those unfamiliar with it
- The potential for abuse: abuse by outsiders from the net is easily restricted, but a "wikiquette" primer for students may be necessary. Making real-world consequences for a student's actions on the wiki might be helpful step for problem cases.
- The need for computers, both at home and in the classroom. Also a funding issue.
