Teaching Through Wikis

Let’s say that you don’t want to send a ton of emails to your students with the evaluation plan, program or classrooms activities because most of the emails that the students gave to you are going to bounce back, either they wrote it incorrectly or that someone didn’t receive anything and you wish that all that information were stored in  a place where your students, supervisors and even your students’ parents can see, download or even participate in the making of information for that place or webpage. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Wikis. What is a Wiki you might say? Well, basically Wikis are shared pages from the web 2.0 era that lets people post and share information at any time and any place. The main feature of the Wikis is that more than one person can participate on the development of the Wiki, by posting or editing previous or new information. Let’s take the example of the famous/infamous case of Wikipedia, this page is a shared one in which people post information for educational, research purposes. In it, we can find topics regarding, health, history, sports or music.

Other cases of Wikis are the ones that are specialized on a certain topic, like for example a videogame wiki like the League of Legends Wiki where the users post information about the game, also they post strategy in order to master a character or explanation of the rules of the game per se. How does a Wiki differentiate itself from other tools such as a blog for example? Like I mentioned before, more than one user can post or edit information that is published on the wiki, also, the content is dynamic, being that it can change from time to time in order to keep the information fresh and updated. Another aspect is that the information is organized in pages rather than in post entries (like in the case of my blog). Other feature is that the interaction between users and editors is less limited like in blogs where it is only limited in the comment section of each post. Wikis are useful tools for education too, imagine that you can post the program of your subject, your evaluation plan and weekly activities and each of your students are notified without having to send tons of emails. It sounds awesome, right? Well it gets better; since it’s a shared page you can let your students be editors or writers of your own wiki, letting them post their weekly assignments, or you can have them participate in forums of discussion. The uses of a Wiki for ESL are huge, you can assess and evaluate the student’s writing activities if you want to use your wiki as a tool to assess and evaluate writing skills, also you can use it to check your student’s reading skills or listening skills with readings or videos. Other uses are for posting vocabulary list of the units that you are working on, or a verb list with their respective conjugation. Summing up, I invite you all teachers to use Wikis in your classrooms, also I invite you all to my wiki: http://listeningcomprehensionclass.pbworks.com/, it is still under construction, but soon I’ll start to post activities. Over and out!