Wikis

Wow! After completing the reading for class this week, I had an eye-opening experience. Richardson pointed out all of the positive and negative components to wikis in the classroom. He validated my concerns and engaged me in all the collaborative, positive reasons to use wikis. As much as I was the teacher that told students to NOT trust wikipedia, I was wrong. I LOVE the idea of having students post an idea and have other students add information, edit, revise, change, delete (where appropriate) to the same information on the same page! Students no longer would have to walk to another students desk and distract students when they have a question or buddy revise/edit. They would be able to complete the activity independently and collaboratively all the same.

The one concern I still have about using these in my classroom would be that I don't know if students would get all the same learning out of this. Stop and think. When a student posts information and it gets changed a few things might happen. 1) The student doesn't notice (face it, that's a fact!), 2) The student notices but doesn't understand why, 3) The student gets frustrated and continuously changes it back every time (can you tell I have a few ED students this year?). I want a student to make sure that if their information gets changed, they understand why. Just as everything else, if a student posts something that's wrong...whatever was posted is what is going to stick in their brain as the correct information...how can we make sure their brain gets the edit too?

I do like what Richardson said about everyday people, with no connections, are the editors of wikipedia. Those people have an interest and want to make sure all of the information on that site is correct. That does make me feel a bit more comfortable with wikipedia and it's reliability for research purposes. That is something I will definitely put into play in my classroom.