My Classroom Wiki

Part one in this week’s series of 5 technologies I use in my classroom every day is my wiki.

A critical part of my classroom is my student wiki, which can be found at http://moixland.com.  A wiki is a website that is designed to be quickly and easily edited using just the browser.  No knowledge of HTML is required!  Don’t confuse the notion of a wiki with wikipedia, which is a community-driven encyclopedia that also happens to use wiki technology.

When my students come to class, they know what’s going on today because they’ve read the wiki.  If they get stuck on a homework problem at night and need some help, they post a discussion topic on the wiki (and their peers and I DO respond quickly).  If a student finds a useful link, it gets posted to the wiki.

A video tour of my wiki can be seen here.

A large list of educational wikis of various types can be found here.  After looking around at various classroom wikis, you might notice that there are a few different wiki hosting providers that can provide everything needed to set up your own classroom wiki for free in minutes!  I have chosen Wikispaces as my provider because of their commitment to K-12 educators.  Other providers include wetpaint and pbwiki.

Your school may offer server space for your own classroom page like mine does.  One key difference between your classroom webpage and a classroom wiki is that ALL stakeholders can contribute content to your classroom wiki (but you retain control over the content and which actions are allowed by your users).

If you use a wiki in your classroom, what are some ideas that you have to add?

If you don’t use a wiki, what are some barriers that you feel would keep you from setting one up or using one in your classroom?