Wiki-Wiki-Wiki's.....WHAT!?

You guessed it! It's another Web tool that can be used at home, at work, with students, with teachers. The ways to use a wiki are essentially endless. But, what is a wiki exactly? Well, according to Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, "A wiki is essentially a web-page with an open editing system". That kind of puts it in a nutshell, but it is so much more. It really depends on you, the creator, and how you want it to be. However, visitors and members of your wiki can edit the wiki, then it is how they want it to be as well. 

Wikis have been around since the 90's, however, it seems that within the past 10 years or so that wikis have really taken off as an instructional technology tool used for collaboration. One of the most commonly used wiki, that you might not have even known was a wiki, is.....Wikipedia. 

How does a wiki work?
Very simple....
1. Create a Wiki
2. Hit "Edit"
3. Type, load, hyperlink, import your content
4. Hit "Save"

After that, you have a wiki. Another big plus, besides the fact that they are so easy to use, is that it's FREE. You can't get much better than free, especially in education. As long as you have access to the internet, you are wiki ready. 

Upsides of using a wiki...
Wikis are a great alternative for students doing group projects. Wikis allow for student creativity, which is a lot of the times lost, when a student is forced to regurgitate the information learned in an essay or on a poster board. Why not allow for student creativity and let them really teach you what they have learned? However, there is a downside to this aspect. If you were teaching at my school, all wikis are blocked due to the limitless opportunities of editing and it being hard to monitor the content. 

Wikis are also a great teacher created website tool, especially in relation to his/her classroom. Kind of like how online college classes have everything in one place already created for the semester, a wiki could be used in the same way by teachers. Practice work could be loaded, notes from a lecture, study notes for a test, or examples of past created projects shown all to help the student get a better understanding of the class when they are outside of the classroom. They could access the content at anytime. Teachers could also create discussion boards, where students can interact and collaborate on the wiki with their peers. 

Teachers could really benefit from having a place where they could come and collaborate without having to leave their classroom or from the comfort of their own home. This would come in handy when having to create subject units or lesson plans. 

The biggest upside of using a wiki in the classroom is that it's so easy and simple to use, that it requires little to no training for your students. I find it to be very user friendly. 

Downsides of using a wiki...
I think a large downside to using a wiki, like I mentioned in the opening paragraph, is the fact that anyone can modify your wiki. This can be solved, be creating members and passwords, so only someone with the password can edit the wiki. 

Another downside I feel is that instead of really using a wiki as a collaborating tool, it becomes more of a place to store items. 

To me, the biggest downside of a wiki is the fact that it is just another web tool, when we already have so many. My county has switched to being completely Google. Our email addresses are from G-mail, we just Google Drive and all of its resources and because of this, there really isn't a need to use another outside tool to collaborate on. The same goes for out students. They too have Google accounts and collaborate with one another on one of the Google Drive applications. I do think it is important to show students that there are other applications to use other than Google, but find teachers don't have the time to learn about other applications that are out there because they already have one that works for them.

I feel like this is where we can come in as media specialists with our all knowing power. :) I feel like it is slowly becoming our duty to have a knowledge bank of resources and tools that we can throw out to the teachers every once in a while to help prove to them that we really do know a thing or two regarding education. Or, we could use wikis in the media center instead of relying on the teachers to introduce them to students. A great way to do this would be to find a willing teacher to bring his/her class to the media center for a lesson that you will teach. Do your background work and find out what the students are learning about, and create a lesson that requires them to visit the media center, but you be the teacher for the day instead. Plan ahead of time and either create a wiki to go along with the lesson, or find an already created wiki that helps with what you are teaching. If you have technology present, pass some of the technology out and allow the students to interact with the wiki as you are presenting the lesson. The possibilities really are endless, it just requires a little time, effort, and knowledge to get the job done. 

Wiki's, over and out. 

Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. (2014). Wikis. Retrieved from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/wikis/