Wikispaces in Education

Wikispaces are basically a place on the web where ANYONE can create a page for use of collaboration in some way.

How can it be used?
Specific to education, wikis are used by the teacher, in most cases, to provide a place for her class to go for resources, updates about the class, discussion posts, assignments and study guides. Teacher can create their own account then create a page for each class he/she teaches. She/he can control, monitor and edit all pages from her/his one account. She/he can also create pages specific to a certain assignment, topic, group of students (i.e. exceptional) ect. This site gives the students a place to go online that takes the place of the classroom while the student is not there!



Advantages:

• Provides a place on web that students can visit and feel a sense of ownership of their class.
• Provides a place for students who want extra practice or help to get those resources (when properly set up by teacher.)
• Provides an organized, differentiated place on the web for teachers.
• Teachers can view statistics about the amount of views and how many different visitors. (Are my kids actually using this?)
• Can view page history (to monitor changes)
• Allows creation of an unlimited amount of pages
• Easy for the teacher to customize themes, text, formats, ect.
• Provides a place for parents to get the opportunity to see what types of things they're children are doing in the classroom.
• Shows the parents that the teacher is making efforts to aid in child's learning process in and out of the classroom.
• Provides a place for the students to interact online (via discussion posts.)

Disadvantages:

• Not all students have ready access to Internet.
• Some students my be intimidated by the wiki and shy away from using it.
• Requires teacher to stay active in this online learning process and some teachers aren't willing to do this.
• Some parents may be intimidated by the wiki and shy away from viewing it and might even encourage their child not to make use of it.

So the audience for this tool will mostly be your students, but also the parents of these students. Also, teachers might invite colleagues to view their sites and glean ideas from them!

I personally believe that wikis are an excellent resource for teachers. I also believe that when created with the learner in mind, the wikis can be very beneficial to the students as well. Wikis make integrating technology into the classroom an easy and fun task for teachers!

Want to know more?

Visit the official wiki website for more information and for steps to get yourself signed up!

Also, click here to learn more about Wikis in Education (k-12).

And you can click here to find out more about the awesome features that wikis come equipped with!