In all honesty I never heard of the word "wiki" until I took this course. After reading Chapter 3 Library 2.0 and Beyond I pretty much comprehend what a wiki is. Wikis are used for internal communication, instructional collaboration, and as a research guide. Using wikis in the media center can be very productive. Teachers can use them for student's book reviews, reports, Pathfinders research on fiction and nonfiction books, and for student's work/assignments. The web site blog.schoollibrarymedia.com/index.php/category/wikis/ has some interesting information about the use of wikis. Wikis can be used effectively in education by having students to learn how to create web sites. Students can track group projects on a wiki and post their discussions and collaborate on design or podcast.
Certainly there are some drawbacks to wikis. In an organization or school setting there are many users contributing and editing on the wiki. There should only be administrators and teachers having the responsibility to edit on the wiki not students. Students may include information that is not factual. Review the web site report on wikis.wikispaces.com/Drawbacks+of+Wikis for more facts on wikis drawbacks. Another drawback is that it does not have an identical customized option as a self-hosted wiki.
When perusing the wiki from last week I realized its strength and weakness. In Library 2.0 and Beyond, its primary strength is to allow contributions from anyone in society. A weakness for the wiki is having too much inappropriate content and resources from the community. The elements that must be taken place to move wikis towards collaboration is for the wiki creator to give up control to the administrators, teachers, and students. A library media specialist must promote the wiki positively whether teachers or students are using it. However, as time goes by they will learn how to appreciate it and understand the importance of it.
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While there is some controversy over the use of social media tools in schools, more and more teachers are discovering that they can be valuable tools for enhancing learning. With careful supervision from teachers, students using a wiki in the classroom can learn about how to use the internet as a resource, how to create content responsibly, and how to protect themselves from online predators. The key is monitoring student work.
I had never heard of wiki's before this class either. I knew that different people could enter information on wikipedia and that the information is not always correct. That why I never used wikipedia for research assignments. I would however use it to look up information but never as a final source. Now I fully understand why wiki are used in an information setting. This is a great collaboration tool and it can be worked on at the users’ convenience. This saves a lot of time and is really convenience to everyone.
Yes, Wikis are a great collaboration tool. It's getting people to collaborate that's the problem. Teachers are overburdened with lesson plans, class instruction, grading papers, yada,yada, yada. Asking teachers to do one more thing is like placing a cherry atop a stack of leaning blocks. It must be done carefully and strategically. Therefore, introducing students to the Wiki first may be a roundabout method of presenting the benefits of Wikis to the school. As students produce book reports or projects through Wikis, teachers may be suitably impressed enough to become interested themselves. That's when you introduce the possiblilty of a voluntary workshop on Wikis. Once teachers are made aware of the usefulness of Wikis for classroom management and instruction, I think it will become increasingly easier for the school to utilize this technological tool.
Using Wikis as collaboration tools is such a great idea and time saver! At the elementary level a lot of grade levels collaborate and share the responsibility of writing units and weekly lesson plans. By using a Wiki, the teachers could share their ideas, lessons, and resources with one another without having to print/copy everything. This would also be a great step for a school to take in making a school-wide curriculum map. That way, each grade level know what the others are doing. In the same way, high school and middle school teachers could use this to know what each department is working on (and therefore what their students are working on).
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