Wikispaces

Original Image: "Wikispaces"
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The Wiki that I have created is a way for me to communicate with parents outside of my classroom. On it, you will currently find a November snack sign up so that parents may sign up for a day to bring snack for the class during this month, if they choose to do so. Also, you will see that there is another page which has useful internet links for children. These are a variety of educational web pages that I have found that will provide students more practice pertaining to the topics that are covered in class. This practice is presented in a fun and exciting way. The goal of including these websites is to make students want to learn outside of class because it is fun for them. This is something that my six year old cousin's teacher has done on her website, and my cousin really gets into playing these games. As a result, she uses her teacher's website frequently.

I can see a variety of ways that Wikis could be used in the classroom. You could use a wikispace to create a site that will better connect you with parents at home, as I have done. On it, you could post the student's homework each week. Maybe you could post a few exceptional examples of student work on the Wiki each week, with different students being recognized all the time. This would encourage parents to actually check the Wiki frequently because their children would want to show their parents that they were the one selected as an example of exceptional work this week. You could also have parents sign up on the Wiki to help out with events like holiday parties or field trips.

As a teacher, you could also have students set up Wikis to assist them with group projects. This could mean that students post group projects on the wiki and then all the students in the group can have access to the Wiki at all times, continually editing and revamping the assignment until it is due. It could also mean that this is a way for the students to communicate so that they don't have a stream of 50 emails back and forth pertaining to the project. This way all of the information that they need for their group project would all be in one spot.

In one of my deaf education classes, we used the wiki in this way, and it proved to be a very effective technique to ensure collaboration and to keep everyone up to date with what we were working on, especially because our group of colleagues was spread out between Michigan, Maui, and Guam. However, we only took advantage of the Wiki for editing purposes, not for group communication. I think that our group could have been much more effective if we had used the Wiki instead of email for communication. Emailed communication became very difficult because my inbox was soon filled with 50 group emails that were spread out all over my inbox. This made it very difficult to locate and access the emails when I needed to refer to them again. Overall, I think that Wikispaces can have a wide variety of positive impacts in the classroom as long as teachers know how to utilize them!