The first wiki I investigated was Kindergarten Counting because of the age level the wiki addresses. I think there are teachers in my district who have doubts that students of this age can handle projects like this and I disagree. With the right amount of oversight, they can produce great things and this wiki is an example of that. The students were the ones who took the pictures that are included on the wiki, which I loved. I imagine, although it wasn’t described, that the students were also responsible for coming up with items to be pictured. The owner of the wiki invited others to collaborate, which I thought was great. I did feel that she could have written a brief outline of their project, learning goals, and made it more apparent that others could participate as well.

The second that I visited was The Great Debate of 2008!. This is a collaborate project that not only involves this wiki, but the use of a private Ning for students to carry on their discussions. I liked the fact that the moderator of the wiki kept that public so others could see the content that the students created. He could have had the discussions in the wiki itself, but I understand the need to protect the kids, thus using Ning for that purpose. I felt like he did an outstanding job outlining the project itself and the curriculum objectives that would be covered as well. It’s too bad I didn’t know about this project in time for some of my teachers to potentially participate.

The Primary Math wiki was the last one I investigated, again so I could see what teachers with younger students are doing with wikis. Unlike the kindergarten wiki I first reviewed, this teacher gave a bit more information about the wiki, however learning outcomes and information about how others could become involved in the project weren’t available. I did like how on each pattern page, there were instructions on how to edit the page and place pictures. Having directions readily available on each page is a helpful addition.

As for my own ideas on how I (will) use wikis, I mainly use them for professional learning and also as a central resource for committees, a couple of examples are the Pandemic Flu Committee wiki that we used last year and a BCS Whiteboard Training Wiki for middle school math teachers in my district. Unfortunately, they didn’t embrace the use of the wiki as I had hoped and it hasn’t become (and most likely won’t) a repository for their shared lessons. Both of these examples are housed at wikispaces.com since we have many people who are members of these and I didn’t want to re-create them under our private label.

On a final note, in the past I published webpages on our district server with some of this same information, but once I found wikis, I don’t believe I have published there at all. The ease of being able to edit from any computer takes the cake.