“Not another wiki..!”

“Not another wiki” was a comment I heard recently while listening to a group of inspiring educators on Plurk Radio.  It was delivered in a tone which suggested this person had ‘done’ wikis ‘to death’ and was ready to move on.  It brought home to me the diverse range of skill, understanding and experience ‘out there’ amongst educators.

My reality is quite different.  Most of my colleagues have never created a wiki.  I’m sure there are many other teachers out there who don’t really have an understanding of wikis beyond wikipedia and have never really thought about classroom applications because they don’t really ‘get it.’

The power of the wiki

I think wikis have huge potential in the classroom.  They are fantastic tools for sharing information and building knowledge.  They are also versatile presentation vehicles.  Indeed,  the list of things I have learned from my current wiki experiment grows daily and highlights the learning possibilities for students.

What I have learned…(so far)

  • How to embed a webpage into a wiki:  Thanks to the Getting Tricky With Wikis wiki!  This makes web pages more accessible and user-friendly, both important considerations for students.
  • How to access and use databases such as Press Display to facilitate students’ learning.  Many large local libraries probably subscribe to this database.  Mine does (CCLC) but you have to be a member to access it.  I used this to add a newspaper article, including tasks, to my wiki.
  • How to use Glogster to build the Useful Online Resources page in my wiki.  This provided a vibrant, visually appealling vehicle to highlight learning tools available to students.  (I can’t draw so this sort of creativity is really important to me.)
  • Read Write Think provides an excellent array of graphic organizers.
  • Internet Archive is an excellent resource for educators.  I found some useful public domain audio books here and added them to my wiki so that students can access them for our theme study, ‘Future Worlds’
  • The State Library of Victoria’s, Ergo site is an amazing resource that is going to prove very useful over the years.  A visit to the essay writing skills page is a must for teachers and students everywhere.
  • How to embed an audio file into a wiki:  This proved to be the trickiest!  Thanks to a twitterer I discovered Divshare and worked out how to do the embedding myself (with a little help from an edublogger post, of course!).

Now, that’s a lot of learning for one little wiki!  Hopefully, my students will gain as much from their own wiki experience in the 2009 school year.

I would love to hear from others with positive wiki experiences.  Please share a link.

Useful Online Resources using Glogster

5 thoughts on ““Not another wiki..!”

  1. I couldn’t agree with you more…raiderphysicalscience.wikispaces.com will continue to grow and morph as I look at what others are doing…I appreciate the links you posted and will be browsing those soon. I am the only teacher I know of using wikis in my entire district but I hope to convince admin to allow me to present workshops this summer on how to form a wiki and use it with students.

  2. Glad one of my posts on The Edublogger was helpful. You can actually upload an audio file directly into a wiki using the same method you use to upload a document or image. Have to admit it did take me time to work out this could be done.

    Wikis are a really good place for many educators because most can relate to wikis easier than some of the other online tools.

  3. Thank you for sharing ReadWriteThink with others. We are very proud of what we have to offer on the site! If you are interested, we pay teachers for lesson plan and teaching ideas published on the site. Let me know if you would like more information.

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