The Wonderful World of Wikis!

Wiki" is a Hawaiian phrase that means quick and it is simply a webpage that can be manipulated or edited by more than one user. This makes wikis ideal for educational settings, but with a few drawbacks. Because the information on a wiki can be edited, deleted, or changed by various users, it would need to be used for a specific purpose in the classroom/media center. For example, any good media specialist will open up their presentation on research with the warning to NOT use Wikipedia as a source because the information can be manipulated.  (Yet, I confess as teacher I have secretly used Wikipedia in the classroom because it is easy to use and is not blocked like every other website on my school computer!) A simple solution is when working on a project to have a back up of your information just in case it is accidently deleted.   Yet we should take wikis at their face value and see that a lot of them do have pertinent, correct information that can also be used in a research capacity as well as project based. 

Reading through the literature, I was looking at wikis in two different perspectives:  a teacher and a media specialist. As a teacher, wikis can be very useful if used in the proper way. For example, I do a lot of group projects in my classes. So having students set up a wiki to work on their projects would be ideal. Of course, my students would need specific guidelines but I think that it is great way to get them acclimated to different technology. As a whole, my county does not have the most updated or workable technology, and we have numerous software problems in the media center and our computer labs. Since all you need is internet access to use wikis, this would fit well for most technologically limited schools. Also, my students could work on the wiki at home since it is internet based.

 As a media specialist, wikis are an awesome tool. Using a wiki to have students contribute to media based projects such as poetry month or book reviews would be wonderful to put on the media center webpage. They can  be used internally like the Cobb County media specialist’s wiki, which I loved, but they can be used as an icebreaking collaboration tool. I think oftentimes media specialist go unnoticed as certified teachers and as teachers we neglect the powerful ally we have in media specialists. So using the wiki as a common denominator when collaborating would be key. It would also help validate the media specialist as an actual member of the teaching staff to the students and not just “that chick who checks out my books in the library”. For instance, I was thinking of how my media specialist and I could sit down and create a wiki based on research or even a book study. I would love for her to have assignments that they need to create and also for them to rely on the media center as their main source. Or even have her create  or find a wiki for my needs based improvement class so that they can work on map skills in the media center. There are endless ways that teachers and media specialists can utilize wikis for collaboration. They thing is they just have to actually do it and I think that begins with the knowledge of how simple, yet powerful wikis can be.  Wikis really are amazing tools for education and I cannot wait it start using them!