Eureka! A wiki!

In our last two class modules I especially enjoyed researching about using wikis and blogs in the classroom, because it was a topic with which I was absolutely unfamiliar. My first two questions were, what's a wiki and why would you want to use it in the classroom? And find out I did with streamers and fireworks and 'Eureka's'!

I first learned the basic difference in purpose between a wiki and a blog. Blog visitors simply add comments to the original content, whereas wikis allow visitors to actually change the content. Blogs are created by one author and wikis are designed to be created and authored by more than one person/student and have searchable documents. So, this is good defining type information, but why would they be so great in a classroom?

After reading the article, A Wiki for Classroom Writing by Brian Morgan and Richard Smith, I visited a website they suggested called arrrpirates. This is a really neat little site created by classes in 4th-6th grade to show off their research on pirates. They each took a content area under the pirate topic, researched it, and created an online version of a report, complete with links to the other areas posted by their classmates. Their peers and teacher could add, delete, suggest information for each area and so help each other create the best version of their information. This one small example, really opened my eyes to what a great learning experience this could be for students. Traditionally, students are either all assigned the same topic or each are given a narrow field for research/reporting. Then the only way the other students can learn from the research of their peers is after the information is validated by the teacher, students have to sit through presentations or such. And I believe presentations definitely have their place and can certainly be done in conjunction with a wiki. But in general, I'd much prefer to spend time poking around on a website rather than sitting through hours of presentations which may or may not be informative and entertaining.

Then I took the idea a bit farther, and started wondering if there was a way that wikis could benefit my own home schooled children besides just the technology instruction and fun factor. Then I thought, how neat it would be to be able to collaborate with other home school students from near and far on a single wiki. The peer interaction on a project like this would be a nice change. My children get lots of peer interaction in activities and clubs and fieldtrips, etc, etc. But they only have a small circle of peers with whom they get to share the products of their course work. Mostly they are sharing work samples with adults. I think this is an idea worth researching. So far in my web search I have found several wikis about home schooling itself, but no kid project sites. Surely there are home schooling families that are using this for project purposes??? Perhaps they just haven't been tagged under homeschool or I need to work on my search parameters. Regardless, I think this is a great idea for me outside of the public/private classroom.

Thumbs up on learning about educational purposes for wikis!