Wikis!

My newest endeavors of attempting to understand the world of technology has started to show its advantages. I have never been keen on technology and haven't really tried to understand the complexities of it. Most recently, we, as a technology class, have been asked to make a wiki page and learn the ins and outs of it. I didn't think it would be that challenging, but I came to find out that wikis were slightly more challenging for me to understand at first than blogs and websites.

I have always heard of blogs. My mom is a fan of the Pioneer Woman's blog about different types of fun recipes or my aunt loves to look at various teaching blogs to get fun and creative ideas but the concept of a wiki was new to me. I heard of wikipedia but how would something like wikipedia apply to teaching?

A wiki was far more than I could have imagined. Why are wikis so different from blogs? Why should I chose a wiki in my classroom over some other forms of technology? In a wiki website, you create a page with your students. For instance, the page might be titled "Rome". As a class, students may be asked to be put in pairs to do different aspects of Rome. It could be things such as "agriculture", "culture", "gods", etc. In these various pages, students can go in an add information, pictures, etc to their page for other students to access. Not only do the pairs all have access to the different pages, but all of the students do. So if one of the team members wanted to add information to the wiki page, all they would have to do is go in and edit it. They are able to access it at any time and do whatever they want to the page. As a teacher, I would also have access to this page to monitor the students' responses and make sure they are appropriate. This is different from a blog because of the ability to edit others' post and because all the students can access the same page.

Wikis provide a lot of interesting teaching styles that I cannot wait to implement into my classroom.