wikiteachinglearningtips / Educational uses of wikis

Wikis can be used as an educational tool in many ways .These are listed below:

• Students can use a wiki to develop research projects, with the wiki serving as ongoing

documentation of their work.

• Students can add summaries of their thoughts from the prescribed readings, building a

collaborative annotated bibliography on a wiki.

• A wiki can be used for publishing course resources like syllabi and handouts, and students

can edit and comment on these directly for all to see.

• Teachers can use wikis as a knowledge base, enabling them to share reflections and

thoughts regarding teaching practices, and allowing for versioning and documentation.

• Wikis can be used to map concepts. They are useful for brainstorming, and editing a

given wiki topic can produce a linked network of resources.

• A wiki can be used as a presentation tool in place of conventional software, and students

are able to directly comment on and revise the presentation content.

• Wikis are tools for group authoring. Often group members collaborate on a document by

emailing to each member of the group a file that each person edits on their computer, and

some attempt is then made to coordinate the edits so that everyone’s work is equally represented;

using a wiki pulls the group members together and enables them to build and

edit the document on a single, central wiki page.

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