Chapter 4 in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms was all about wikis and how you can integrate them into your classroom. It was interesting to find out that term “wiki” is actually short for “wiki-wiki”, a Hawaiian word meaning ‘quick’. Throughout out the chapter, I found out more and more ways possible for me to use wikis in my classroom. They are an excellent resource for acquiring information as well as sharing it with others and they are becoming in important tool in our global society today.
It’s great to see more people are benefiting by using wikis in the world today. It is good that the majority of their users are actively working to keep them accurate and helpful rather than having false information. For example, the chapter talked about a college professor who created multiple errors on a variety of Wikipedia pages, only to have them corrected within a couple of hours. I was also amazed to hear about the Wikipedia page containing information on the tsunami, after on entry of only 76 words it grew to 6,500 and had been edited over 1,200 times within 48 hours of the first posting.
I think it is crazy that people are talking about in the future there will no longer be traditional textbooks and it will be online. I feel this is a definite possibility because of where we are at now, with the popularity of Wikipedia as a vast source of the world’s knowledge as well as other wiki’s that are being created by even the largest of corporations, McDonald’s, Sony, and Disney all included.
As important as wikis are in the world, it is vital we realize their potential use in the classroom. Wikis have a lot of potential as a great classroom tool and if we start using them now, we can have our students ready for using them in the future. A good way to use wikis would be to use it in the classroom as an online text or curriculum. It would be great to utilize them so parents and students could be involved in the process. Students could have discussions online about things they enjoyed in their daily classes.
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