Kristy: Wonderful World of Wikis

It took me a while to really jump on the wiki bandwagon, but I'm so glad I finally did. Wikis are so useful in the classroom. It's amazing how many uses there are for them. Not only is it good to have your students learn to responsibly publish content on the web, but it's a great collaboration tool.

Just recently I had my webmastering students create avatars, vokis, and animoto videos and publish them to a wiki. The results were amazing! They also had a discussion on there. I really wish I could share this, but I had to keep it private due to FERPA. (A few students used their photos in their posts but didn't get their parents to sign the proper forms.)

My BCIS students have been creating SuperHeroes or SuperVillains for a PowerPoint project, and they have shared their characters on this wiki:
http://themccoybciswiki.wikispaces.com/. It brought up so many opportunities for positive discussion, and the students are loving the project. There is so much animation in their voices as they compare their Supers and plot out their storylines.

I made this wiki for Kris for our 6th anniversary:
http://kmsquared.wikispaces.com/.

Since you are able to lock the pages, you can often treat your wiki like a blog.

My favorite website for this is WikiSpaces since they have the free educator wikis that allow for removal of advertisements and allow pages to be made private without the fee.

It's so very easy to create and contribute to a wiki. If you haven't tried it you should.