It's a Wiki Whacky Whirl

Hey,
A few of my readers have asked about wikis so I thought I would share what I know about them and how I use them with teachers in the classroom.

Wikis are interactive webs that allow viewer/members to edit the pages in the wiki. In my dealing with teachers, we have created one page per student, created topical or thematic pages for individuals, pairs or threes. The one page per kid works well when everyone is doing the same project and the objective is to post each student's efforts for all to see...and to possibly comment on.
The thematic or topical page concept works well when you have a lot of different of sub topics or chapters or characters or heroes or villains, etc. and one wants to assign a topic to each kid or pair or triad.
I am a fan of giving each kid his or her own page be it thematic or by name. That way each person is responsible for his or her own page. When you have more than one person working on a page, only one person can post to the page at a time or else they will cancel each other out when they make changes.

Here's my wiki link http://thornridge.wikispaces.com/
Basically, I invite teachers to create a lesson using a wiki and then we plan the lesson, create the wiki, invite the participants (kids), teach the kids how to post to the wiki, introduce the lesson and then let 'er rip. At the end, the kids can present their wikis to the class or the teacher can encourage them to just take a look at each other's pages and maybe even leave a comment. The cool thing is that wikispaces is giving away 100,00 free space for teachers. They have only given away 45,000 or so so far so there is still plenty of opportunity to get in for free. There are also other wiki sites. This just happens to be my current fave rave.

There are some parameters one can set for the wiki. You can let anyone view or post, only members of wikispaces or only members of this particular wiki. Security could be important because one can really edit oneanother's pages. We did have an incident where an outsider put some very foul language on many kids' pages. Even though the teacher/owner of the wiki can monitor the changes, if the person who makes the changes is not a member of the class, the teacher might not be able to find out who made the change.

Here's a couple of wikis I worked with:
http://languagearts-collier.wikispaces.com/
https://caged04.wikispaces.com/
https://facomcom.wikispaces.com/

The last one as an attempt to get Faculty Association members to create a discussion forum. It really never took off, but there's still time.

The whole editing process is very intuitive and to some degree limited to basic web elements. One can write code and post that way, but if you're doing code, you might as well just have a big boy or big girl web page. For class work, this is great.

So that's it in a nutshell.

Keep in touch,
Pray for peace and Happy Halloween.
Rob