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| picture taken from learningtoolsacr.blogspot.com |
So far we’ve mentioned
blogs and blogging as one of the most popular tools that Web 2.0 has offered to
teachers. But there’s another web application that is gaining popularity in EFL
teaching: the wiki, an interactive and dynamic website that allows you to add,
modify and delete content in collaboration with others. As blogs, they’re free
and easy to create, but, while blogs are public, the wikis give you the option
to create a private space in which only invited members can participate.
Whether public or
private, depending on the organizer’s settings, all users or members of a wiki
site can create, edit and contribute to an apparent nonfinite number of pages,
and it doesn’t only allow you to add texts or photos, but also videos, gadgets,
widgets and more. In other words, it provides different editing tools and
templates, as well as it allows you to add several web applications.
Wikis can be used for
different educational purposes: for syllabus, to make content accessible in
seminars, as platform for course projects or workshops, for forums and
discussions and as an extra-classroom space for teaching and learning. Wikis
can be beneficial for both students and teachers in many ways, because they:
a.
Improve communication and interaction: the
students have the opportunity to share opinions and information either through
commenting on the teachers’ or their partners’ works and pages.
b.
Encourage students’ participation:
wiki’s options of posting comments or having discussions fosters the students’
participation, as well as the teacher can give them the task of commenting
about something specific that leads to whole class discussion.
c.
Promote collaborative work: the fact that the
students are integral part of the wiki space, with the possibility of editing
and collaborating to the site’s content, may give the students a sense of
community and responsibility. Also, specific tasks prepared by the teacher may
demand collaborative work from them.
d.
Facilitate projects: wiki is a space where students can play an important
part at, as well as it’s ideal to create specific class or groups projects.
Platforms such as Wikispaces, for example, have a ‘Classroom’ modality apart
from the traditional wiki, where the creator of the page has the tool to start
projects by giving specific assignments to a determined group of users.
e.
Help to develop students’ reading and writing skills: teachers have the opportunity to provide students with more material
for them to read and also to send particular writing tasks, but the fact of
only writing a comment about a particular page content is already writing
practice. Besides the fact that not only the teacher, but also their peers, will
have access to their writing gives the student a feeling of commitment with
what they write.
f.
Provide a space for sharing resources: as
it was mentioned before, not only can we send our students extra material for
them to work on, we can also lead them to blogs or sites where they can find
more material and even have material used in class available for them (e.g.
presentations, worksheets, and so on)
g.
Improve students-students and teacher-students relationship: as the sense of community increases, students get to know a bit more about
each other, but also the teacher knows more about the students, almost as much
as they get to know about their teacher. This gives teachers a great advantage,
since lessons can be planned around the students’ favorite topics and even taking
into account their wishes and past experiences. Sometimes, Wikis can give you
more information about our students than a one-day Needs Analysis.
h.
Develops creativity: both teachers and students’ creativity have a space
to grow in a Wiki. Since you can create as many pages as you like, add gadgets
and any kind of audiovisual material (e.g., pictures, videos, podcasts and so
on), teachers have the opportunity to adventure and propose a variety of
activities and tasks that might not have been possible in a traditional
classroom. Teachers and students practically have no limits when it comes to
resources since the web gives us a large amount of material, which encourages
us to do something different.
There’s a lot of
material on the web devoted to the use of Wikis in the classroom and I could
recommend you the next:
This article by
Vanderbilt University may give you more ideas on how to use a wiki, and the
writers even give you real examples of how other instructors are using wikis.
Also, it’s interesting the fact that they mention the difference between
working with a wiki and using a blog. http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/wikis/
Since we’ve mentioned
online learning in previous posts, this article can also be of your interest: ‘Why Wikis? Student Perceptions of Using Wikis in
Online Coursework’ by Faye Deters, Kristen Cuthrell and Joe Stapleton, which
shows the perceptions of a particular group of students in online instructions
about using wikis. It also reflects around the benefits and limitations of this
tool. http://jolt.merlot.org/vol6no1/deters_0310.pdf
Finally,
I recommend you to read ‘Use of Wikis in Second/Foreign Language Classes: A
Literature Review‘, by Mimi Li. In this article, the author examines and
reviews literature regarding the use of Wikis in the ELT classroom, (i.e.
theories, tasks, wiki applications) and categorizing it into different topics.
This is an article which can help you if you’re interested in the state of the
topic so far and gives you a base for further academic research. http://callej.org/journal/13-1/Li_2012.pdf
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