Building Learning Power with Wikis

A wiki is a website that is developed through collaboration. This makes wikis particularly useful tools to use in the classroom as they are easy to use for group, paired or class based projects. They enable interactive work to be conducted by pupils of any age and are easy to set up, edit and maintain. Teachers are also safe in the knowledge that they can track pupil progress; identify who has done what and ensure that the pupils are working in a safe online environment. Wikis are key learning features of all of our VLE solutions for Primary and Secondary schools. If you want / need support in setting one up on Learnanywhere or in Moodle, please feel free to give our support team a call.

Using wikis in the classroom – a few tried and tested examples.

About our town. Create a wiki for a class that focusses on the area in which you live. This wiki could allow pupils to post about different geographical or historical features; add information about their out of school interests or simply act as a portal for them to share information about the local area. This type of wiki is rather informal but can act as a great activity for tutor sessions and is an easy and effective way of introducing learners to the use of wiki’s in the classroom.

Building on the About our town wiki, develop a wiki in which learners are given specific areas to research and write about. An example from a few schools that are close to us is a wiki in which learners from several schools and local organisations are writing pages about the numerous men of the area who fought in the First and Second World Wars. Here learners are collating information about family members or people who lived close to their school; adding source material; taking photos of memorials and adding transcripts of interviews with people who lived through the Second World War.

Use a wiki as the basis for collating pupils reviews of books that they have read or films that they’ve watched. This enables pupils to share thoughts about things that may be of interest to their classmates and is an easy way of tracking pupils understanding of books and films that they’ve watched.

When you’re going on a field trip assign different elements of the visit to groups of pupils and give them the task of writing up that part of the day on a dedicated wiki. This could include using photographs and video footage from the day and provides an accessible and useful website that reflects on their experiences. This also allows learners to share their experiences with other classes, parents and external agencies that may have been involved in the planning and execution of the visit.

Over the course of a programme of study get pupils to add ‘how to’ sections to a wiki about that course. A simple example is asking different groups of pupils to write up instructional text for different recipes they’ve cooked in food technology, or instructions for science experiments.

Populate a wiki with preprepared content that includes lots of deliberate mistakes. Pupils correct the mistakes collaboratively and add relevant information, citation and images as appropriate. Prizes and rewards can be offered to the pupil(s) who make the most improvements to the wiki.

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