Wiki's

Last week we looked at wiki's in more detail. A wiki is an online space that can be used individually, in the form of a blog, or collaboratively, for sharing ideas working on projects. Green, Brown and Robinson (2008) describe a wiki as "a web page or site that can be modified by anyone who visits the site." I have added a video below which demonstrates how this is possible.

We have set up a Wiki in our ICT group that will be used to share information and ideas and also allow us to communicate asynchronously. At the end of our project we should have an online space that shows all the work we have done individually and as a group. We plan to use the space for tasks we have to complete, for planning the video we are going to shoot and organising who is going to take on the research for various areas of our discovery project. We will the display what we have done on the wiki, this could then be used as an educational resource that could be used in the classroom.

I was reminded during this ICT session that to be able to use a wiki effectively each group member will need their own page if we are wanting to work on it at the same time. This prevents the previous persons work being deleted, which would be the case is multiple people accessed and edited one page at the same time.

I feel this input gave me more confidence in using a wiki. We briefly looked at wikis in first year, but not in much depth. I am now familiar with the features of a wiki and how they can be used to our groups advantage. I can see how they could be used in the classroom for collaborative projects, where children have individual tasks that will be put together and presented as a whole. I do feel however, that children would have to be fully familiarised with using and creating a wiki before using it for a task like this. This could be taught in a separate ICT input before they start their project.

There are many ways other ways in which a wiki can be used.The pie chart above shows the results of a survey which asked people how they used wiki's.

References

Green, T., Brown, A. &Robinson, L. (2008) Making the Most of the Web in your Classroom: A Techer's Guide to Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis, Pages and Sites. London: Corwin Press, Inc.