Interesting Ways to Use a Wiki in the Classroom

Well in fact 9 interesting ways. I picked this up recently via Tom Barrett on Twitter (twitter.com/tombarrett). This is collection of slides held as a Google Doc. A variety of authors have come up with a number of unique and interesting ways in which wikis can be used to support the student learning experience. Most of these are aimed at school level education but have equal applicability to the HE context.

Among my favourite suggestions are:

* Create a subject-specific repository - students are made responsible for their own pages.
* Ask for student to respond on projects, classwork, class discussions, visiting experts.
* Allow Students to create pages:for fun, to communicate, to relieve stress, to organize for presentations.
* Sharing teaching techniques among staff - build up a library of techniques.
* Use the discussion elements as a forum for students to air issues relevant to them,e.g. they could create separate wiki pages relating to certain issues, (stress, useful resources etc.). I like this because it emphasises the fact that each wiki page has its own discussion forum which allow students to talk around the issue.

(just realised I’ve listed nearly all the uses! - still have a look at the presentation as this has more detail).

Anyway have a look yourself (Web Link). If you’re new to Google Docs there’s some really interesting features. For instance in the bottom right corner is a ‘view together’ option which allows you to see anyway else who is view the presentation and exchange ideas via a text box.