Using Wikis in the Classroom

Anna-Mieke MulhollandTeacher Librarian

Emmanuel College

Teacher Librarians ...The leaders in the field...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

Plan ...

• Why use wikis?

• Is it hard????

• How to have a stress-free wiki-life

• Free and private wikis online

Why Use Wikis with Staff?

• It’s a great collective memory

• It’s a great dumping ground for ideas trawled from conversations

• Great way to store practical policies

• Problem solving with departmental issues

• Work with other teachers to create collaborative lesson plans (link to a reflective blog??)

Using Wikis with Students

• Great place to store resources eg, annotated bibliographies, websites, writing samples

• Maintain a journal of group work

• Create a glossary of terms as students work through a unit

• Peer review (link to a blog?)

• Organise a group!

Thoughts on keeping it stress-free...

• First time round, they need lots of support to remind them why and how.

• Don’t feel it has to be beautiful. It’s scrap paper.

• Get the kids to develop organisational tools, eg, colour coding their work.

• Check it.

• Email them or add to their wiki.

... Stress free wikis..

• Teach the students first, let them play on one for the whole class, then give them the real thing. They need to get the “plays” out of their systems.

• Actively teach them to use attachments, add hyperlinks, create new pages if necessary.

• Remember, you know more than them.

Wiki-spaces – free and private

• http://www.wikispaces.com/site/for/teachers You can get an ad –free wikispace for free as an educator

• http://www.wikispace.com/ not as pretty...

• www.google.com Yes- Google even does wikis ... And they’re the prettiest I’ve seen.

Great ideas..

• See this site for a list of 50 ways of using a wiki

http://tiny.cc/QiVru