Eduwikis - Using Wikis in the K-12 Elementary Classroom

 Wikispaces is offering free wikis for K-12 classrooms. Our school board is providing workshops for teachers to run their own classroom wikis. Over the past two months, we've experimented with running student wikis in our Grade 7 and 8 classes.

There are several ways to use wikis in the classroom:

Wikis are the technology-equivalent to a KWL chart. At the start of the unit, you might create a KWL chart in your class to see what students know, want to know, and want to learn. Over the course of the unit, you might revisit the flipchart to see how your learning is growing. At the end of the unit, you could evaluate if some of your initial conceptions were correct. A wiki would allow you to do the same thing, but online. It could be updated at home or at school, and the information between revisions can be compared.

Wikis are a great way to document changes made in the writing process. During the editing and revising stages, you could have students do peer editing and comment directly onto their friends' drafts. The student would then be responsible The hidden wiki link fixing and addressing the suggestions made.

The power of wikis comes from the ability to compare revisions and drafts using the history feature. At the top of this page, click on the history link and you'll see you have the option of comparing 2 drafts of this text. So you could click on the first draft and the final published version and the wiki will highlight all of the changes that the student has (or hasn't made.)

Teachers, parents, and students could use the history log to see how well they've revised their work.

There are several positive things to think about as you experiment with wikis in the classroom.

You can bulk create accounts for students by emailing it to the wikispace help desk. 

Students can work on the same pages at the same time (but different sections) because Wikispace has an automatic merging feature.  

You have a complete history of edits (and who makes the edits) which helps you in terms of assessment as well as keeping cyber-vandalism to a minimum.