Teachers often ask which is the best wiki for classroom education. Wikis are understandably in demand by teachers. A wiki in the classroom gives teachers an additional tool to provide, identify and explore precious learning opportunities, using a wide variety of media.
The flexible student/material interface of a wiki in the classroom gives students chances to extend their education in different ways and students who are struggling with face to face classroom work often relish the extra time a wiki gives them to explore and understand a topic and welcome the additional media they can utilise.
Let us have a go at identifying the best wiki for classroom education.
Criteria for the best wiki for classroom education
Before I state my opinion about which is the best wiki for the classroom, I had better reveal the criteria I used to reach my conclusion.
Best classroom wiki has No Ads
Teachers need full control over what information students are exposed to in the classroom. Ads placed on a wiki page by the wiki software provider can carry undesirable messages. Even contextual ads such as google ads can be problematic. The contextual relevance is decided by a google robot’s interpretation of the page and this may be way off mark.
It is not only biology classes that may result in undesirable ads, teachers have found undesirable ads appearing on pages discussing politics, geography and science pages.
It is clear that the best wiki for classroom education should contain No Ads.
Best classroom wiki is easy to use
Teachers want students to focus on learning the class topic, not how to use a wiki. That is, of course, unless the class topic is using coding such as html or wiki markup.
The classroom wiki needs WYSIWYG editing. Students can then create and edit pages without needing to use code.
The classroom wiki needs easy navigation so that students can find their way around without getting lost and good help needs to be available at the click of a button.
The wiki needs to be usable in the students language and help available in that language.
Best classroom wiki facilitates use of a wide range of learning media
Teachers will want students to be able to learn from and express themselves in whichever media suit them best. They will want teachers and student to be able to easily incorporate text, color, images, video and audio into their wiki pages.
Teachers need to know who is doing what on the best wiki
Teachers need to be able to monitor what individual students are doing on the wiki. The classroom wiki needs to support individual log-ins for every member of the class, so that every edit made by a student has their user name appended.
Best classroom wiki needs separate areas for individuals and groups
Teachers will want students to be able to collaborate on some parts of the wiki but work as individuals on some projects. They may to allow students to develop some pages in private before revealing them to the rest of the class.
Best wiki needs to be safe from intruders
Their needs to be good mechanisms for keeping out vandals and spammers. The wiki provider must have a clearly stated privacy policy.
Best classroom wiki links easily to external web to resources
Teachers will want to provide external web links as resources for students
Best classroom wiki has an enthusiastic group of teacher users
An enthusiastic user community helps teachers share ideas on how to make the best of their classroom wiki
The best classroom wiki supports teachers
There are a number a ways in which a wiki can support the teacher. These include:
- Notifying the teacher by email or RSS whenever a change is made on the wiki.
- Keeping statistics on the use individual students have made of the wiki.
- Ability to make comments directly on students’ wiki pages.
- Todo lists or calenders that layout what is expected of students, by when.
The best classroom wiki is free
Classrooms are usually cash-strapped so the best classroom wiki should be free.
Do you agree with these criteria? On the next page I make my choice.
Tagged with: Best • Education • Wiki
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9 Comments
Thanks, the criteria are just right, very helpful
Mark, the criteria you presented was really great. I am just starting to think about using wikis in training - not necessary in class, but otherwise. Your criteria shows that you clearly have been thinking about this a lot more. The criteria seemed very clear and concise.
Maybe one additional point that I could think of, maybe not so much for the school education area, but definitely in the area of educating business people, would be the possibility of easy access on modile device. That seems to be a strongly growing phenomen.
Kenny
Thank you Kenny
Wikis are great for online training because they encourage interaction. They probably works best when training is seamlessly integrated with day-to-day work. The wiki sets a direction for the workforce and raises the standard without the word ‘training’ even being mentioned.
Mark
This is a fantastic set of criteria! I’m a developer at Wetpaint who also spent a year in graduate school for teaching, and I just wanted to add that yesterday we announced that we’re making ad-free wikis available for educational use. You can see the details here: http://www.wetpaint.com/category/education We’ll keep working on making our wikis useful in the classroom. Wikis for education fit perfectly with our vision, and I’m personally super excited to see our work put to good use in the classroom. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Ben F. (not Ben E., our CEO)
Thanks for posting these helpful tips on how educators should choose a good wiki host. I might offer that PBwiki meets all these criteria, gives educators a powerful & ad-free environment, and is by far the most popular wiki host for educators, with well over 100,000 educational wikis hosted.
Thanks David
The criteria PBwiki had trouble with was the ability to identify and monitor the activity of individual users. I understand PBwiki is working on this. Is this functionality now available to ad-free educational users? If so I will need to update this post and my PBwiki review
Mark
Nice post
If you want to use something other than a commercially available wiki for your classroom then I have an option for you….a wiki system you can set up on your own LAMP server. Thus, no ads, no harassment, etc.
I’ve been developing tools (using a research grant) for a wiki for classroom use (specifically a science classroom)…it started out as tools for wikka but now is essentially its own fork.
Apart from the “typical” wiki features found in wikka (www.wikkawiki.org), there are now also integrated:
- Bulletin Board/Forum/discussion thread tools (looking darn close to things like phpBB etc)
- Blog Tools
- “Linkmanager” tool (for keeping lists w/ use counts of links)
[The Blog/Forum/Thread/Linkmanager tools can all integrate through the BB tool....maintaining the same color scheme & look/feel across those different tools allowing you to use the BB interface as a portal]
- Mail tools
- IM Chat tools
- Simple Paint/Drawing & Graphing tools
- Simple “spreadsheet” tool w/ simple statistics (mean, median, std dev, count, freq) available from dropdown menus (spreadsheet has a permissions system to allow multiple users/contributors as well)
- tagging w/in the wiki (a dynamic & amorphoeous system w/o ownership…it’s essentially a way of indexing the pages, w/ a “favourite tags” feature)
- page notes (so you can annotate others’ wiki pages) w/ an organizing tool so you can find your notes.
- Calendaring/Scheduling tools
- “Presentation” tools (think of it as a simple version of something like powerpoint…that leaves it’s notes visible online)
- simple “polling” tool (basically can do T/F, M/C & open-ended) with simple analysis components built in
- contact/phonebook list
- buddies list (with tracking of pages they’ve been to)
- View Gallery tool (to view drawings or graphs the user has created)
- a “project” tool (that combines images w/ comments, spreadsheets, project blog on one page)
- a feature called “MyTown” which essentially allows a user to subset the whole wiki to only those pages of their friends, their pages, their “favourite” pages & admin pages.
- full admin features including page locking/hiding, page & username banning, image upload approval system, backup system (of images, database & files), “hide” forum contributions, etc
- easy making of tables using markup
- YouTube and image embedding (but, as currently written, only for images available IN the wiki that have been approved)
- “Block” system so a student can block someone from contributing to various tools (blogs, forums etc) on their pages, sending them “mail”, as well as seeing their name in forums etc
- threaded commenting system for each page
- permissions for editing/viewing/commenting/actions on each page
- search tool
- registration can be keyed to a password or locked, log-in can be locked.
It does *not* have wysiwyg (I have tried to get wikiwyg working with little success)…only markup at this point.
It was designed specifically to use with high school kids, but I use a great number of the tools in teaching my university courses as well.
Overall the tools are meant as a cross between course-management & a wiki system so that a teacher can “run” a course but also allow students to integrate their use (running class projects, assignments etc) with the class system. The tools offer the “open” benefits of a wiki but also offers the structured communication tools (forums, blogs) used elsewhere.
Everything that has been written is open-source (LAMP based…altho’ I have tested it on a windows system) and I’ll happily provide it to the owner of this site when it goes “gold” this month or next. [please note that my programmer is leaving at the end of this month....it won't be a full "install" system that's available when he goes.....you'll have to have some facility with creating directories & databases, setting permissions etc...altho' I'll provide a mysql dump file so you can create the extra tables w/o a problem. This isn't a commercial endeavour, so that kind of support isn't available right now.]
Note that apart from the admin tools the communication tools in this system are “open”…any student who has page access can set up a BB, forum, thread, blog, linkmanager, etc etc. If you want to run a classroom where students are not able to set up these sorts of tools, then this is not the wiki for you. My intentions are for a system where the regular users are empowered w/o needing an administrator to give them permission to do these sorts of things.
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