This YouTube transcript excerpt records multiple educators describing wikis as an online collaboration tool for students and teachers, emphasizing easy page creation, extended access for students (home use), and peer feedback. Speakers highlight the need to teach digital citizenship (copyright, appropriate conduct) and report that wiki use encourages reflection, democratic collaboration, and empowers students online.
Wiki is an online collaboration tool that students and teachers can use to put up ideas. Sort of like having an online conversation.
It's such a shift. It's actually a shift larger of a larger society in the way we think.
One of the things that you need to do before you ever engage your students in this kind of activity is you need to kind of go through some digital citizenship things and what is and what is not appropriate. Not saying that this is right and this is wrong, but that there's varying degrees of things and that students need to make value judgments as they look at different things via copyright, etc.
At first I thought, wow, this is a powerful tool. But when I started really using it now I can see that all my other classes are eventually going to have some sort of wiki component. You see them collaborating, they can do this at home. A number of students I have that can't finish it in a period will go home. They can log in instant access. It's the same thing. So I really feel this is a huge, huge collaborating tool.
If what you're doing is publicly visible, then you are incented to do things the right way. Here's a space. Go work together, be polite, be nice, and be democratic. Reflection is at the heart of learning. And one of the things is that when you're working in a wiki or when you're working in writing, that's an opportunity for reflecting on your ideas and having other people come in and give you feedback on it and then keeping it going.
I felt confident enough sharing the wiki. It was easy making pages. I showed the kids how to do it. I said, here's your assignment. You need to take your report that you've written and post it up on a page. The kids pick it up just like that. It's fine. You just show them and then they got it. I'm interested in giving the kids a safe place to try out these tools and to see what they can be used for so that when they are then becoming more independent and using tools like this on their own in middle school and high school, they've already maybe gone through some of the pitfalls you can have with a tool like this, where people post stuff up that's not kind to each other and have a safe environment in which to process that and talk about it.
Kids are on the web all the time and we want them to be empowered.
