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Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Wiki's and Education

I think using Wiki's in the classroom is a great idea! I find it to be just as beneficial as using blogs in the classroom. If teachers and parents are worried about the "public" characteristic of Wiki's--that can easily be fixed by making your Wiki private. Some great things I liked about Wiki's and the classroom are as follows:
  • It teaches children how easy it is to create Websites--and gets them comfortable with technology; which is very important in our technology driven culture.
  • It incorporates and encourages project development with peer review. If everyone has written a paper and reread it so many times that they couldn't see a glaring error right in front of their face and your friend points it right out. Multiply that by a million, and you get a big improvement.
  • It also encourages group authoring. The whole class can work on a project together without getting confused with who made the latest change.
  • Finally, and one that I find most important, Wiki's in the classroom encourage collaborative teaching. Students will have to learn to work together and to create posts that are compatible with one another.
I have found a video that provides some great and helpful ways to use Wiki's in the classroom. It is a video that is talking about High School students--however the practices can be adapted for Elementary students as well.



1 comment:

  1. I agree with you wholeheartedly! Wiki's do have the major potential to be used within the classroom. I am also a firm believer that collaborative teaching helps students learn the value of working together and helps them learn that as a team they can get more accomplished sometimes than by themselves.

    You make a good point, in that technology is becoming more and more prominent in our culture, so students should start to use Wiki's and blogging more within the classroom. I definitely think that Wiki's can become useful in elementary school classrooms. Especially because i think that the students would gain much pride in creating and maintaining a wiki within their classroom. It is a good way for the students to stay involved within the classroom as well as post important information and highlights of the months for their parents to see.

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