Monday, March 1, 2010

Collaboration–Leveraging the Wiki Platform

This video is very informative about wiki platforms and how they can be used to better students in the classroom. Using wiki to have students described what is going on in class, what they are learning and different ways they are learning and understanding different concepts. Students can make wiki pages on things that they enjoy and like. Also other kids can comment on and change things on other students pages, therefore engaging other students and allowing students to share their interests and get excited about all different kinds of things.

Wiki also allow students to become more engaged and excited about the work they are doing in and outside of the classroom. Helping students become involved, for example how the students used wiki to create flyers for the car wash they were putting together to raise money for their school, each student wanted to be involved and help in any way they could.


Paula White used a quote that I really liked "educators often think that school is the point, when it needs to be the path, so what path are you taking your students down when using wiki in classroom?" Paths to self collaboration? Path to self directed learning? path to putting traditional school tasks online helping them learn how to create wiki and how to use them.

Wiki would be a great way to get students engaged, I might say that it might also get really frustrating for some students, but I think that with the knowledge that students have about computers these days and with the right direction wiki will really make students want to do better and be more excited about the work they are doing because they get to post and write about it on their own wiki or the class wiki!!

1 comment:

  1. I agree technologies like wikis can be frustrating, but the more we work with these tools the more comfortable we get with them. One of the biggest benefits of using a wiki is that you can access it from anywhere: the classroom, the library, or home. Also, everyone's contributions (or non-contributions) are tracked. For group work, this can be very helpful. I know I've been in plenty of group projects where some people didn't do any work, but still got all the credit in the project. It would have been nice to work in a wiki where everyone's contributions could have been tracked and were visible to the teacher / instructor.

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