Wiki Main Page > School Library Tech Camp > 3: Wikis
School Library Tech Camp - Thing 3: Wikis
Introduction
Wikis in Plain English from CommonCraft
Why Wikis?
Wikis are really just easy to edit web pages. No software needed, no downloads, just click on the edit button and away you go. Everything is done online through a browser window. You can have a wiki that only you contribute to or open it up to collaborators and share the work. Wikis save your editing history, so you can go back to earlier versions if needed. And you can download all your content to back it up. I use this wiki as an easy way to share resources for my classes. I can add new resources right in the middle of class if I need to. So handy and so easy!
Uses in Schools:
- Team Projects: Wikis are perfect for team projects. Everyone on the team can add to and edit the group's project on a wiki page. It's as easy as clicking on the "edit" button and adding your content. Older versions of the edited pages are preserved, so students can retrieve earlier work if they want to. This history also lets you view the history of their work and who edited what. You can even leave comments for the students about their project. Other students can leave comments too.
- Research Pathfinders: A handy way to pull together links to resources for student research projects.
- Research Organizer/Journal: Wikis also work well as a place for individual students to keep track of their notes and progress on a research project. Other students, teachers, parents (whoever you give access to) can also view the work and leave comments. See Joyce Valenza's blog post for a suggested outline for this type of wiki.
- Student showcases: Students can use wikis as a portfolio of their work. It's easy to create links to other documents that they've created throughout a class. And this gives them a simple way to present all their work and offer reflections on their work as well.
- Go Global: Find other classroom partner and collaborate with students around the world.
Core Activity:
This core activity is quick, just sign in to this wiki and create a page you can use during the workshop. This will be a handy place for you to test out embedded slide shows, videos, widgets and other types of content. If you want to explore wikis in more depth, come back to this later and explore the Additional Activities.
1: Login to the wiki
2: Create a new page
- Click on the Create a Page link
- Name your page
- Add it to the Tech Camp Participant Pages folder
3: Edit your page
- Add some notes to the page just to see how the pages are edited.
- Remember to click on SAVE when you're done.
4: Check out the Insert Plugin options 
- During the workshop, you may want to test out adding slideshows, videos, widgets and other media to your wiki page.
- To do this, click on: Insert Plugin --> HTML/Javascript
- Paste in the code from your media site.
- Check the Allow Javascript box --> Preview --> OK
- Save your page to see the results.
Additional Activities:
- Set up your own wiki at:
- Wikispaces for Educators - Remotely hosted and free. Wikispaces provides educators with their PLUS account for free. PLUS account lets you make your wiki private and is ad-free. Users can be added without an email address.
- WetPaint - Remotely hosted and free.
- PBWorks - Remotely hosted and free. Free account doesn't have backup options. Easy to add additional accounts for students without email addresses.
- MediaWiki - Open source software that you install on your own server
More Resources:
Examples of wikis in schools and libraries
- The Clarion - 7th & 8th grade students at the Charleston (SC) Day School us a wiki to publish their newspaper.
- Archipelagos - Deerfield Public Schools
- Global Studies PathFinder - Springfield HS Library
- Abby's Travelogue - Companion to a 3rd grade school project. Read the blog post here.
- Remember When - Memories of Ipswich -- Ipswich (Queensland) Public Library project to preserve memories and photos of seniors in the community. Great resource for students doing local history projects. I love this project. What a wonderful model for a collaborative community project with any combination of students, seniors, schools & libraries participating.
- Flat Classroom Project - Students collaborated to discuss trends from Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat"
- Grandview Elementary - 3rd grade research projects
- High School Online Collaborative Writing - Writing project for multiple schools.
- Voices of the World - Classrooms around the world participating in an audio based project. Each month a new task for the students. Fun stuff!
- Creekview High School Media Center - Created with Google Sites, which is very wiki-ish. Owners can invite people to edit pages, easy to edit and organize content, can revert pages back to earlier versions.
- Biology Pathfinder - Unquiet Library's wiki pathfinder.
- Biology Page on Wikispaces - Example of pulling content from other sources via their RSS feeds and creating a page that updates itself!
Professional Wikis
- California 2.0 Currriculum Connections - Companion to California's school library Learning 2.0 project. A place to share ideas for using 2.0 tools in the curriculum.
- Curriki Curriculum resources
- LMNet Wiki Share ideas and resources with other school libriarians.
- Library Success Wiki Great source for ideas about library services. Share your successes here!
- New Tools Workshop Joyce Valenza great lists of all sorts of tech resources. You could spend weeks exploring here!
More examples of wikis in education are listed on these sites:
Other Collaborative Tools
- Google Docs - online word processing, presentations, spreadsheets and more. Invite others to collaborate.
- Zoho - online word processing, presentations, spreadsheets and more. Invite others to collaborate.
More Wiki Resources
- Which Wiki is Right for You? School Library Journal article discusses pros and cons of several popular wiki software choices.
- WikiMatrix - helps you choose which wiki service you want to use.
- Ten Reasons Your Pathfinders Should Be a Wiki School Library Journal article - Joyce Valenza, June 2007