Pros about Wikis

There are many pro's about Wikis.

First of all Wikis are modern. They are what alot of people use and are now integrated into our everday lives. People from all over the world use Wiki's and it is a growing concept throughout the world. Therefore the children we are going to be teaching will be learning about something that will be valuable to them in this technological age.

Wikis create social collaboration within the classroom. Students can also work on their Wikis in an environment that is suitable to them such as at home. Many students find that their learning is most effective when they are actively involved in the construction of their knowledge. Collaborative learning exercises are student centred and enable students to share authority and empower themselves with the responsibility of building on their foundational knowledge (Myers, 1991).

One common way to use wikis is for students to plan how they will do an assignment: a provisional agenda is drawn up, and the URL is distributed to the students, who are then free to comment or to add their own items. Students can add their knowledge onto the wiki for others to look at and use if necessary.

An example of how wikis are used in an educational setting are:

The Faculty of Applied Science Instructional Support links wikis into its course management system authoring environment so that design teams can quickly and collaboratively build reference lists and outlines, brainstorm instructional strategies, and capture suggestions. Educational Technology Coordinator Jim Sibley reports: "The ability to spawn whole sites or a series of pages astonishes people when they first see it. . . . You can quickly map out pages to cover all aspects of complex processes or projects."

An academic research unit on campus used a wiki for planning a technoculture conference—to collect supporting resources and to gather contributions from invited participants. They used the wiki during the conference, live, with laptops and wireless access, to record group work. Following the conference, participants subsequently edited their collaborative authorings from a wide variety of locations, resulting in a "conference proceedings" of an altogether different sort. The organizer, Professor Mary Bryson, observes: "[The] wiki functioned in this context as an intellectually appropriate technology, aesthetically and politically in keeping with the theme of the event, which was the significance of ubiquitous media in everyday life and the ways in which accessible tools mediate the construction of popular culture."

https://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp

As you can see wikis are becoming more useful in an educational setting than most people realise!

Another example related to more of the primary school setting is at a school the children used Wikis to develop a story that the whole class ended up writing together. This was written by students in Australia and it is a choose the path story. Very interesting to check this out http://terrythetennisball.wikispaces.com/ The story shows that there was alot of collaboration and e-learning involved within this project. Ferris and Wilder argue that wikis provide one possible tool to help bridge the gap between teachers and students.

Finally with Wikis there are many websites that you can already use the templates to set up a wiki for your classroom if your computer literate skills are not top notch. The website http://my-ecoach.com/online/webresourcelist.php?rlid=4992 has ideas for teachers setting up a wiki, different examples of wiki's and once again how wiki's are important in the sense of collaboration and developing the teacher student partnership.