Four educators explain why pbwiki works in their classrooms and committees. Students pick it up immediately, everyone edits with one shared password, and materials stay accessible instead of scattered across emails and lost files.
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. And it needs to link to at least two other pages. The kids pick it up just like that. It's fine. You just show them and they got it.
It wasn't so hard because I just put the agenda on there and said, go look at this agenda. I didn't give. It wasn't a discussion. I, I said, here's try it out. And as soon as everyone had done it, our director was on that committee as well. And when she was done last time we were talking about it, she said, wow, I wasn't so sure about this, but I really like it. And everyone saw the value of it. As soon as they had gone in there and worked with it themselves, they saw the value of using it, they saw how easy it was to edit it and, and to add their own ideas that there wasn't this huge learning curve.
All the material is always there, it's always accessible. And I don't run into the issues of, oh, I've got this formatted on this type of document, or oh, I couldn't get this email to open, or I lost this thing or I lost that. So it just eliminates all that hassle. And then I go there and there it is.
You can just go in, post, type in, whatever, and if it's a link, you just highlight it. It's very intuitive.
If we get people to do something simple, we say, hey, just go to this page, click this button, type in this password, just write a sentence. That's it, any sentence. It's just simple, simple.
So they don't need to do any user logins or anything. They just put the password in and then you can start editing.
Once they get the idea that this is a universe that I can explore and I can open documents and I can click around and I can navigate and I know where I'm at, then they fly. I mean, you see them fly. And I've seen that even with just on last time I introduced it, they just all of a sudden was live. They said, what is a wiki? And then as I explained it, they started, so if I click here, this works, and that works, and this works and it's very organ.
