Wikis for Collaboration and More

A wiki is a space online that can be used for collaboration as the video “Wikis in Plain English” from CommonCrafts explains. So you can basically edit a website over time with a team of collaborators.

I like Wikispaces as a tool for creating Wikis. It offers educational accounts for teachers and students that are free of advertisement. Student account can be created by the teacher without providing email addresses. The educational account also comes with some project management features such as creating projects and teams and setting milestones.

What makes a wiki a great tool for creating a website the simple way is that it uses a visual text editor for creating pages that can include media such as pictures, video or links and widgets or uploaded documents. For each page a history of revisions is available, so pages can be reverted to earlier versions if necessary.

Collaboration is supported by a discussion forum for each page and by the comment feature that allows to leave comments on text passages.

Wikis and individual pages can be private for a group of members, public or protected, which means open to view but not editable by anyone.

I am currently using wikis in my class for group projects and have seen other colleagues using them for student portfolios, as class websites or for collaboration with other teachers on a common topic. Some teachers use wikis to collect and share their resources.

Here is a stack of resources about wikis that I have been curating.

How have you used wikis in your classroom or for a different purpose? Please add your comment.

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