Wikis in the Classroom

In the past year or two I had heard quite a bit about teachers and classrooms that were using wikis.  For me, at the time I saw “using a wiki” as being analogous to creating wikipedia-like entries.  I wasn’t sure as to this was applicable to to all the scenarios I was hearing about.  Then a few months ago I took over some Physics classes where the previous teacher was using a wikispaces.  I still didn’t make a connection with this type of wiki use though, and in some ways it seemed like the class wikis were being used more for a file repository.

Not long after the end of the school year I started using and exploring wikis much more extensively in one of my MET courses, ETEC510.  One of our assignments for the course was to ceate a wiki entry for our class wiki on learning environments.  Here I learned about wiki markup languages and how an entry is structured, but I still didn’t make a strong connection with how a wiki would be used in a classroom.  I felt that a wikipedia style entry would be reasonably advanced for a lot of secondary students.  However, around the same time of the wiki entry assignment I started using wikispaces for a group project.  Here we used the wiki as a collaborative sketchpad of ideas, where different types of tasks could done such as writing text and uploading files and media.  Being a collaborative environment, the History function of the wiki was interesting.  We used the wiki a lot, and I found it to be really useful tool.

I’m still a bit unsure of the best practices for using wikis in the classroom but I now know a lot more about them than I did previously. I like mediawiki for doing “wikipedia style” entries.  I think the markup language, while requiring a bit more work to learn, offers many accordances that help the user put together a good entry.  For creating an easy to use collaborative environment, I’m pretty happy with wikispaces. I think I will also explore what pbworks has to offer.

If you use wikis for your online or f2f classes, I would love to hear what type of wiki software you use, and how you use it with your classes.