Wiki Wonder?

Week 4: Thing 5

I watched the CommonCraft video on Wiki's, which I really enjoyed... that is a great series of videos! I keep wanting to use one of those in my own class. I love the combination of low tech and high tech in the videos.

Anyway, I found the video very helpful. I actually played around with a wiki, before I set up a class website, and I did not enjoy it. I did not really like the "look" of the wiki.. it is just not that inviting to me. But that is a really minor point. My biggest worry about wikis are that kids can post, and edit the page. I didn't feel as if the site was very protected, which may or may not be true, but it just made me nervous enough that I actually never opened it up to my students. So instead I just set up a webpage.

I spent sometime checking out many of the educational wikis that were showcased, and I can see how they would be helpful. One of the wikis that I saw was about teaching history. They had topics about AP classes, elementary classes, important people, US history and world history. I could see that it would be really helpful to many educators. I also thought it was cool to know that it initially started out as an activity for a university class and then expanded to include educators from all over the world.

I also looked at a few wikis that were created for school libraries, and I liked how they could set up online book clubs and book reviews that the students could participate in. I did notice that many of those pages though, had very little activity. I could not tell if that was because I was not a member, or if it was because it had not been maintained and supported. Either way, I thought it would be important for a visitor to the site to be able to see what was going on, because that would encourage them to join the wiki.

Even though I saw some cool things, wikis are still not as appealing to me as many other websites.
But thats OK, right? To each their own! :)