NECC 2008

Well, I made it to San Antonio and back! It was quite an adventure to say the least. I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say I was happy to get home to my family.

On the technical side, I gained some new ideas for technology usage. There was so much to choose from, so I decided to focus on blogging and wiki usage in the classroom. Thankfully, I learned more than just that.

Wikis in the Classroom
This event/workshop discussed wikispaces.com, a powerful website that offers 4 levels of wikis to the public. The first level is free, but it doesn't offer closed classrooms. The second level is $5.95/month and offers closed classroom usage. Gratefully, teachers can be upgraded to the second level for free after a short application and verification.

If you can't think of how to use wikis in the classroom, let me explain what it can do and give a few examples. Once you understand its power, you will probably start to see opportunities arise.


How Did It All Start:
As stated in Wikipedia, "A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, .... Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia, is one of the best-known wikis.[2] Wikis are used in business to provide intranets and Knowledge Management systems."

Its derivation, also from Wikipedia, is as follows: "Wiki Wiki" (/wiːkiː wiːkiː/) is a reduplication of "wiki", a Hawaiian word for "fast". It has been suggested that "wiki" means "What I Know Is". However, this is a backronym."

How Wikis Work
You are probably familiar with the site Wikipedia, an online site which enables anyone to add information to a topic. The fear surrounding Wikipedia is that students will find misinformation and cite it as reliable information. We encourage our students to start with wikipedia and then verify the information using other reliable sites.

How Wikis Can Work in the Classroom
From the definition above, the most powerful words I see are "collaborative websites," "collaborative encyclopedia," and "knowledge management systems." Is this not what we strive for in the classroom? We seek knowledge in a collaborative environment, and we need something to help us manage all of the knowledge we acquire/gain.

Think of a topic that you would like to research, consider, discuss, and perhaps debate. For this publication, let's choose the causes of the American Revolutionary War. Now, I might create my wiki and ask my students to go online and answer the question, "What do you think caused the revolution in America?" My students would go online and be able to state their own opinion as well as read others' and respond to their postings. This creates a dialog among the students, and it might get much deeper than what could happen in the classroom. Remember those students who will not participate in a discussion in large groups. It would be interesting to see how he/she would react online.

As a teacher, I would want to monitor the postings very carefully in the beginning to make sure everyone is working within the groundrules as stated beforehand. Of course there must be ground rules. We'll get to them later.

As a teacher, I can now work within the framework of the wiki to identify misconceptions and then ask the students to go back and correct their own misconceptions. As students seek answers to the misconceptions, they will learn so much more about the topic.

The research can be done using a textbook, trade books, or other electronic sources that might be available.



For more information on educational wikis, please click here.

To see an award winning educational wiki, please click here.

To see a K-5 wiki on Dr. Seuss, please click here.