#wikis and other web 2.0 tools that can support your wiki

Chapter 7 of Stephanie Sandifer's book Wikis for School Leaders is all about how other common web 2.0 tools can be used to help support your school's wiki.  The first thing that they suggested to use to help support and make your wiki easier to use were all things Google (as Dr. Krug would approve of).  She mentioned how easy it was to have multiple people work on one document and also just that it was sometimes more user friendly for people who aren't very good with wikis to just put something in a google document and put that in the wiki.  They also mentioned that if you were to use something such as a google presentation you could embed it into the wiki or in serval wikis and then when you edit the original it will automatically update the versions embedded in the wikis.  It is super easy to use for effective collaboration on a variety of projects.  They also mentioned subscribing to RSS feeds and blogs that can help make your wiki more up to date and efficient.  For those that are really up to date with their technology use the author of the book even suggested things like following other educators on twitter who would be able to provide you with links to helpful resources and give input on ideas.  This chapter was essentially saying that a wiki is meant to be expanded and connected to other forms of web 2.0 which will help it run better and more efficiently.  I personally found this chapter to be helpful because I'm more familiar with the way to implement and use most of the web 2.0 tools that they mentioned it just seemed easier and less intimidating for me to think about implementing in my own classroom one day or even help start it's use in my future school.  Overall this book had a lot of good ideas and it was easy to follow and gain a lot of information from.

If you build it, they will collaborate.... or maybe they won't?

*This blog entry is in response to chapter 5, "How?- Making It Work in Your Organization", from the book Wikis for School Leaders by Stephanie D. Sandifer

Building a wiki is just the first part of integrating it's use in your classroom.  You have to actually teach people how to use it and have an effective way of teaching people about it.  In terms of getting people to use the wiki that you have created and embrace the technology presented to them can be a daunting task because you have a wide variety of technological backgrounds and it is hard to make sure that they all can understand and embrace it.  This chapter had a list of do and don'ts for organizing your wiki and I found a lot of the things mentioned very helpful.  They mentioned how important it is to allow access to the wiki outside of school or district intranet, i.e. make it so people can use it even when they're not at school.  They also suggested allowing small groups of people to create their own wiki so they can play around with it and become more comfortable on using wikis and in turn help teach others about how useful they can be.  Be sure that when people have successes in using wikis or learning about wikis that you reward them in some way or highlight their extra effort, don't let participation or learning go unnoticed.  Let the people who you are trying to get to use the wiki work together and give feedback on things that they like or that could be improved.  Also be willing to go the extra mile and really teach those users who may be digital immigrants about all the things they need to know to help them be a better wiki user.  You also need to be sure that you don't take the experience of some users for granted.  Don't abuse your resources and also don't expect that just because your users may be tech savvy on some subjects that they will grasp this new technology.  Be patient with your users and be sure that the guidelines you set for this wiki are not too restrictive the people using the wiki need to be able to use it effectively and not have a million restrictions holding them back.
I think the biggest thing that I learned in this chapter is that to make a wiki be an effective tool you need to have a clear, well-defined vision before you present to the people you want to use it.  If you don't have a clear vision they can't have one either.  Also you need to be sure that you have workshops or step-by-step instructions available to give out to those people who may not be as technologically savvy but are willing to try.  Make it as easy as possible for people to learn and become involved in the use of wiki as possible, the easier it is the more people will be willing to give it a try.

When in Doubt Wiki.

I recently read the fourth chapter in the book Wikis for School Leaders by Stephanie Sandifer.  This chapter was all about when and where to use a wiki in the context of leadership and specifically in a school setting.  One of the first things that she said was that Wikis should never contain personal information or important data about the teachers or students.  It is important to realize that wikis like other things on the internet can never really be 100 percent secure especially when you  have a large amount of people who have access to various wikis that you may be using.  They also suggested that wikis be used as a sort of memo instead of using meetings to get information out to certain people, they said that wikis would be better used for instead of meeting time when people could be getting work or other things done.  Following suit with using wikis as a form of memos they also suggested simply embedding a link to the wiki with daily updates instead of attaching word documents or pdf files that get bulky and can clog up a person's email.  This is a more simple solution to keeping computers running more efficiently and it makes it more likely that everyone will look at the information trying to be conveyed.
 
They also used this chapter to talk about how wikis can be used as a form of professional development.  They not only allow the users to create personal profiles where their employers can look and use the information displayed on that page to create teams to work on certain projects or see who is more involved in the workplace and who may not be as involved.  Along with that they mentioned using wikis for PLCs (Professional Learning Communities).  Wikis can be used as a way for professionals to communicate with one another especially when their may not be another teacher who works in their speciality area at that school, it allows teachers to communicate with in a district.  They also can be used for storing lesson plans and sharing curriculum mapping ideas with other teachers.  Basically wikis allow educators to share information more effectively and efficiently than something like email would do.

Why use a Wiki?

In the third chapter of her book Stephanie presents the reader with information and examples as to why they should use a wiki and how they can be helpful in ones classroom.  She talks about how the way that we communicate with each other has changed and that we need to embrace this change and accept all the things that come with this change.  She also points out the inefficiency that can cripple some school systems because they don't have one uniform place where people can go to find information or to communicate with one another.  They included a chart in this chapter that kind of laid out the characteristics and structures of this system and how it could really be beneficial to people who decided to adapt the system of wikis.  It also gave examples in this chapter that showed how the uses of wikis helped to completely change a school systems forms of communication.  One of the most useful features that I noticed in this chapter is that it included a picture that showed the difference between using wikis and using email as a form of communication among people.  It just kind of reinforced the idea that when you are using email it is easy to leave people out of the loop and for different drafts of the same document to be floating around because certain people have only edited certain parts.  Where as when you use a wiki everyone has access to read and edit the same document when it is in one place and you don't have different versions floating around because one person edits it and then it is the same spot, you don't have to worry about someone only getting half of the message.  She also ends this chapter with some reflection questions to really help you think about how this chapter has helped shift your thinking on wikis.  I think the biggest thing that I got from the chapter is how much more efficient you can be when you are using a wiki, everything is in one online place that you don't have to worry about it getting lost on your computer or forgetting the paper that has all of your information.  The efficiency of it all is what really impressed me about the way they presented the wikis.

was there life before wikis?

The next few posts that I complete will come from the book Wikis for School Leaders by Stephanie Sandifer.  Hopefully through exploring this book I will learn how I can use wikis more effectively in a classroom setting and I can apply these skills to my future classroom.  The first chapter in her book just talks about life before wikis and kind of points out some of the ways that we used to organize and keep information that may seem a little outdated.  She basically wants educators to think about if they are really achieving in terms of "educating all people".  Is there a better way than how we used to do things?  What could be more useful than having binders of paper that you barely open and could spend hours looking through to find one specific paper?  The main intent of her message was to push people to openly embrace using the wikis and internet.  With all this talk of collaboration and sharing are we really doing just that or are we all talk and no action?  To have effective systems we have to be aware of the complexity that actually makes up these systems and just understand them more deeply.  With our learning about wikis and how they are set up and the way that school systems utilize them or don't utilize them we can come to appreciate them more deeply and may one day be able to use them in our own classroom.  So I guess for me I start this book hoping that I can understand this more complex system of how these internet hot spots work.  And hopefully by the end of this book I will have an idea of how I could execute this in my own classroom and maybe even help my future school system understand the value behind using wikis and other similar technologies in my own classroom.  This first chapter was really short and brief, but it did a good job building up my anticipation for what I will read in the rest of the book.

Sustaining your Wiki

The chapter I looked at today talked about how to sustain your wiki once you have created it for a class.  I think that this is a very practical thing to talk about especially for teachers because often times we can get that initial drive needed to create something online, but once it is time for us to actually go about managing it's upkeep it is a completely different story.  In this chapter the author also included a table and a rubric of sort that helps educators not only evaluate the level of their wiki, but also what it's use will be.  The author also includes different facts or indicators of various levels and it provides you with ideas of how to become better or gain more skills in the art of maintaining a wiki or broader your wikis use.  I think that this book would be a great resource for me to use as someone who enjoys the uses and ways technologies can be utilized in your classroom, but I am not the most technologically savvy person and I'm not one who will really go out and look for ways to become better at utilizing it.  I know that this book and rubric would be something very helpful in helping me become a more effective utilizer of the technologies that are available. 
It is clear to me that the author of this book took time to actually develop their ideas and that is a mark of someone who knows what they're talking about.  I think it is great that they have this resource available for teachers to use and it would be something that I would very highly recommend for people who want to become better at using wikis, but who may not necessarily have the time to do the research and dive deeper into the subject matter on their own time.

This was done from Ch.6 in the book Wikis for School Leaders by Stephanie D. Sandifer

Wikis

Today I read a chapter that talks about what wikis are and the two different types of wikis that can be used.  Wikis are websites that can be edited by a large number of people who do not need to know html code to edit them.  Some wikis are very popular and get a lot of traffic which is both a good and bad thing.  It's good to have a lot of traffic because you have a lot of people collaborating and you can even have experts add their information to the specific wiki so that everyone can benefit from it.  But at the same time you can also have people post false information on wikis just because they have the power and freedom to do such a thing. 
One type of wiki that people use is that of a public wiki. Public wikis would be websites such as wikipedia.  These wikis use crowd sourcing on a large and public scale for people to communicate with each other.  Public wikis are generally the ones that are more likely to have misinformation or misuse of the website occur on them.  The second type of wiki is that of an enterprise wiki.  These types of wikis are more restricted and have more of a management feature on them.  These have much more restrictions on access, control, and the number of people who are allowed to participate on them. 
As far as being able to use wikis in the classroom I think that they could be great tools to teach about how easy it is to find false information on a wikisite and on the web in general especially with older elementary school students.  You also have the chance to use this tool inside of you classroom to help show the collaborative process and allow for people to see the process you went through to get to a decision.  If you are not sure of the use of wikis you can find almost all of the features that you have on wikis available through googledocs or other google features.  Don't limit your creativity as a teacher, because your creativity will be a spring board for your students.

*All of this information is a reflection to chapter 2 in the book Wikis for School Leaders by Stephanie D. Sandifer