Wiki Fever!

Many teachers vigorously defend the use of Wikis in education. They say wikis are collaborative, safe, and promote an ongoing pursuit of learning. This may be true, but through a full week of discussion, I am still not convinced that wikis are the most effective online collaborative tool for elementary classrooms. They recommended 3 wiki Websites for use in the classroom:

• http://pbwiki.com/
• http://www.wikispaces.com
• http://www.wetpaint.com

This video explains what wikis are in plain English



In my opinion, and in the opinion of other teachers on the Ed 632 blog this week, There are risks and obstacles in using wikis.

Dallas writes, "As for risks, by giving my students user names to use the private educational wiki at Wikispaces.com, they also gained access to creating their own wiki. I don't have total control on these particular accounts. I'm sure that the Wikispaces business profits by the exponential number of members they get by offering teachers free private wikis."

Lindsey writes, "Some of the risks with wikis are that information that is published may not be correct." She also stated, "The one frustration that we had was that they all wanted to edit the page at the same time and they couldn't if someone else was editing the page. "

Trevor states, "My largest concern is the "blind leading the blind," grammatically speaking. Students may make suggestions that don't improve a paper, and the author may not be sharp enough to realize it."

Sarah reflected on a previous attempt as she states, "I have tried to establish a class wiki, but about half of my parents were not ready to let their children have email accounts. "

There were an assortment of positive student projects as well. My alternative for the "wiki phenomenon" is the use of Google Docs. Google Docs can do the same thing and has other features that make it more user friendly. Features like speadsheet, powerpoint, and document sharing and editing all in one place. In Google Docs students could have their own account where they can upload, share, customize, and edit their projects. Distant students can be invited to edit and share as well. Since Google is a well established and multimedia rich suite of applications, there are many ways to collaborate and integrate other features of the Google suite. Additionally, Google Docs has a "Windows" look to it's navigation scheme. Since my students are working on Windows machines, this makes Google Docs all the more enticing.