Make Way for Wikis

Oatman, E. (2005). Make Way for Wikis. School Library Journal. Retrieved March 10, 2010 from http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6277799.html

This article was all about wikis. They mentioned the ways that some teachers are using them now. In an elementary school in New York, Sarah Chauncey, the school's media specialist made wikis for 6 classes of 3rd graders. They will use the wikis to write drafts and to collaborate on what they want to include in the school's newspaper. In a school in California, a world history class published their own history on the Holocaust on a wiki. The state of Virginia is receiving a grant from Microsoft to create a virtual wiki community. These are just some of the way that teachers are using wikis to help facilitate learning.

The article also talked about how wikis work. Wikis were created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham. He invented it so other programmers could efficiently share information. One does not need to be a programmer to use it. It is very user-friendly. Some of the wikis are free to use, which is a good thing in education. The one's that are not free are not that expensive. They are usually around $5 a month.

The other half of the article was about wikipedia and the argument of being a good resource and tool for students or not being a good source for reliable information. Many scholarly people do not believe that wikipedia belongs in the schools as a place for students to get information for research. Some say it is, "poorly written, incomplete, and inaccurate." Others are for it. They say that the errors are caught soon and are quickly fixed, and that most users do not even see these inaccuracies because they are fixed so soon.

As a future teacher I think that wikipedia can be used for general research like if a student wants to find something out real quick. For a research paper though I would want them to use scholarly information like journals. Schools pay thousands of dollars a year for access to these journals and students should take advantage of this. All the journals are scholarly and were edited for correct information.

On the other hand I think the wiki pages are good to use in the classroom. It can be used in many different ways that would be beneficial to the learning environment. One way that I can think of is having students type up their papers in the wikis then the other students can peer edit their papers. The students can receive feedback on how to improve their papers, or they can get their grammatical errors fixed. I think wikis are a good thing and we will be seeing them used more and more throughout the schools of the United States.