Week 7, Thing 16

The first I heard of wikis was when I was invited to join and "tagged" by my co-ed service fraternity when they created a wiki of our chapter/organization. http://www.apogb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Alpha_Phi_Omega_Gamma_Beta
The wiki lists our history, records, members, and cardinal principles of our organization. I viewed it but I never participated in editing any of the content because I wasn't familiar with editing and so forth.

Then this past spring I attended ASTE conference and encountered this thing called Wikis but used by a school, Bering Strait School District. On the mainpage is their curriculm, standards, vision, etc. But then there are links to the different grade levels where you can see different units posted by teachers for parents. Wikis seems like a great way to communicate with parents and the rest of the community. During this ASTE class, I also heard about wikis also can be used between two different schools to collaberate on one project.

Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki
I found this one to be great for librarians - it was very informative. Like the wiki said, they intended it to be a "one-stop shop" for information for librarians.

teacherlibrarianwiki
This wiki space is for librarians to share knowledge about teaching, presentations, lessons, units, etc.

What I like about wikis is that it gives you a list of contents for you to instantly jump to that section/content information. It breaks information down for you so you can find what you are looking for quickly.

I also decided to google about what could you do about wikis and found a great article from about.com.

http://personalweb.about.com/od/wikihostingandsoftware/a/511wiki.htm

It gave me other ideas I hadn't thought of to use wikis for - photo album and planning a special event (always used evite.com or facebook events). It led me to http://jimbbq.wikispaces.com/ called We-Write, a wiki site for people to write stories together! That is a way to incorporate it into the classrooms.

I also found how teachers can use wikis (http://writingwiki.org):

How can teachers use wikis to facilitate teaching, writing development, and learning?
-Provide a space for free writing
-Debate course topics, including assigned readings
-Share resources such as annotated bibliographies, websites, effective writing samples, conferences, calls for manuscripts
-Maintain a journal of work performed on group projects
-Require students to collaborate on documents, such as an essay written by the entire class
-Discuss curricular and instructional innovations
-Encourage students to revise Wikipedia pages or take on new wikipedia assignments
-Inspire students to write a Wikibook
-Support service learning projects (i.e. use wikis to build a website about a challenge in their city)