Wikis in the Classroom

What is a Wiki?

Wikis in Education

            As the web continues to grow and more and more information becomes available online, it is essential that students can analyze and manage that information (Richardson, 2010). According to Teehan (2010):

Wikis can impose structure to the available resources to help us make some order of the chaos of the Internet. Once the relevant information is organized, then we can use higher-level thinking skills to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize the information, which is education’s ultimate goal. (p.41)

Using wikis in the classroom necessarily presumes collaboration among students and gives them a genuine opportunity to publish and share information they regard as important (Teehan, 2010). Collaboration can be understood as the process of bringing people (i.e. students) together to share and create ideas. Wikis are the instruments that can make that happen. Also, the act of publishing and sharing information online ushers students from the role of recipient to contributor by exposing their ideas to a worldwide audience. Therefore, their work becomes a “real-world, noteworthy, and grown-up endeavor” (Teehan, 2010, p. 49).

Pedagogically, learning becomes relevant to them motivates further learning of a given subject matter being studied. Also, wikis give students a natural outlet for creativity and promotes their connections with other students. Furthermore, students engage in the higher-level thinking skills of analysis and synthesis of information.

It is important to mention that although scholarly research supporting the benefits of using wikis in educational settings is insufficient, that lack of evidence is not evidence that wikis do not work (Teehan, 2010). What it does indicate is that more research is needed (Teehan, 2010). In support of using wikis in educational settings, Teehan (2010) aptly asserts, “Wikis will not guarantee perfection, but they do promise participation in the learning process” (p. 45). I agree.

Wikis in My Classroom

Believe it or not, wikis can be a very effective collaborative tool in a mathematics classroom. Seeing that wikis serve several purposes, such as resource library, collaboration tool, communication tool, organize and store files, publishing resource, etc. (Teehan, 2010), there is incredible freedom in the range of uses in the classroom. Being able to see or think beyond the typical uses of wikis in the past creates almost endless opportunities for almost any classroom and any content, even mathematics.

            I have created a resource library in my classroom. This resource library serves as an archive of class notes and assignments and makes them available to students at any time from anywhere (link to my webpage). This also serves as a communication tool to keep parents up to date with assignments the content their children are learning. Of course, I must use district provided software but the concept could easily be applied using a wiki and be equally effective.

            Many of my students do not have someone at home that can help them with their math homework. That provides a challenge when I assign homework because I am not available to help them after school hours. However, small group wikis could be used as a peer tutoring vehicle which I could monitor and even offer help when a group is stuck on a particular problem.

References:

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin press.

Teehan, K. (2010). Wikis: The Educator's Power Tool. Santa Barbara, California:

Linworth.