5 Things to Do When Creating a Class Wiki

Wikis can be put to many uses because of their flexibility. One of the areas where flexible tools can provide great returns is in the educational field. Setting up a Wiki for your class to support your teaching activities can provide a contemporary but useful addition to your teaching methods. Wikis are most beneficial when they are used with projects or courses where multiple people work together on the same subject at the same time.

Before starting a Wiki for your own class it is a good idea to think about what you actually want to achieve with your class Wiki and the steps needed to get there. Below are five steps to help you achieve your online teaching goals:

1. Find A Wiki Service: Many Wiki online Wiki services are currently available to create your own classroom Wiki with. A short search with your favorite search engine on for example 'class wiki' should give you enough results.

2. Choose Objectives: This step may seem obvious, but it’s important to choose between two ways to use a classroom Wiki. A Wiki can either push information to the students by using it as an information-providing tool, or it can pull information by letting students share their information and collaborate on a project.

3. Naming Scheme: It is important that when you want to monitor what every student is doing that you can identify them. This is a crucial step that most educators think about after most of the students already registered their accounts. So before starting a Wiki think of an appropriate naming scheme that the students can use when they create their login names.

4. Explain & Monitor: While the students are working with their Wiki don’t forget to provide feedback to them on the process. Not everyone will immediately understand the concept and know the rules of the game. The best way to teach them about the usage of the Wiki is just by showing them how they should do it. Monitoring the Wiki daily and adding comments to the pages created by the students is an easy way to provide immediate feedback on their work.

5. Grading: This is probably the most difficult part of the whole process, because you have to find out what the students contributed and assess their individual contributions. Most Wikis provide a history page where you can see which student made a contribution to a page.

Using a class Wiki as an educational tool can provide an efficient and fun way for student to do their projects or other course work with. Make sure you think trough all of the necessary steps before you actually start, so you can effectively guide the whole process.