Wikis for Collaboration: Examples
Wikis are used for many different purposes: an easy way to put a syllabus or instructions for students online, a place to collect documents or work on shared documents for a department or district curriculum, a place for students to share their work, and a place for students to do collaborative projects. You will see examples of all of these uses for wikis in the examples below.
1. Which wiki?
As you are exploring, make a note of which wiki is being used (PBworks, Wikispace, WetPaint, etc.). Do you have a preference for one over the other based on what you see?
2. Who did that?
Pick one of the examples and see if you can figure out how to see who did what on the page. For example, in a PBworks wiki, you will see a "Page History" button towards the top right. Click to see who did what when, and then choose two of those in the list to compare, so you can see exactly what was changed.
It's a good idea to let students know that you can see all of this. And it's good for you to know that you can always "roll back" to a previous version if someone accidentally deleted things they wanted to keep.
Examples of educational wikis
Cherice Montgomery has a page of links to examples of wiki use in world language education - in a variety of categories.
Search for "world languages" and grade level to find examples from Curriki.
If those aren't enough, here are some more!
2 music examples - Rock'n'roll Hall of Fame (done as a webquest) and Top 50 Rockers (ind projects)
Database of CMC activities - search for "wikis"
Grade school creative writing and audio
Penn State Communications Class Team Projects
District space to share rubrics and other information
http://deepriver.wikispaces.com/
University of Montana English Language Institute
Regions de France - collaborative class project
CobbESL - example of teacher training with a wiki (adapt it for your class!)
SUA Learning Clusters Vocabulary - collaborative vocabulary wiki!
Research and Writing - a composition course wiki
Collaborative writing project - students in colors
Ideas for using wikis for world language education
Collaborative wiki project between schools in CA and VT
ABE ESL wiki site, a framework
Student-created study guide for historical novel
Links to a variety of EFL wikis
ESL Online Newspaper and section 2
