A community is like a ship: everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.

—Henrik Ibsen

Why wiki?

Of all the Web 2.0 tools, wikis seem to be the most controversial. Community editing of pieces in places like Wikipedia have made some suspect of what is on the Internet. While this may be true, teaching students to question the authenticity of websites should go hand in hand with using Web 2.0 tools. A July 1, 2007 New York Times article (attached at the bottom of this page) helps to go "behind the scenes" at Wikipedia and show the measures that have been put into place to preserve the integrity of information on the Internet.

Off my soapbox, one of the most engaging and thought-provoking pieces I read in learning about wikis came from Brian Lamb's article: Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not.

If you've got some time and prefer a visual approach, librarian John Hubbard does a nice job with video snippets of his wiki presentation. It gives a nice back ground on wikis and Wikipedia, the pitfalls of Wikipedia, and how to use wikis. Another user-friendly video on why wikis work come from Lee LeFever at CommonCraft. This one is a great resource to explain the power of wikis!

Finally, a posting from Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach at 21st Century Collaborative captures the essence of using wikis to build learning communities, particularly the visual from Stanford University.

Wiki Tools

pbwiki : As easy as making a peanut butter sandwich, seriously!! And not only is it free, but educational sites are now ad free!! A relatively bland site background wise but it gets the job done!!

We will practice editing and using pbwiki from the site Visioning Change.

wikispaces: Simple and easy to use - and they are giving away 100,000 educator spaces for free!! (Which means ad free!)

wetpaint: You are here! Easy to use and nice templates to make your page exciting looking!!


NEW!! A "report card" on the three wiki providers above from School Library Journal (5/1/2007) and WikiMatrix to help you decide the perfect fit for you!


Wikis To Watch
An annotated list of wikis in education. Updated regularly!!

If after reading through the amazing work of these educators you are concerned about introducing wikis in your classroom, read this blog post from Cool Cat Teacher to get some ideas of where to start.