Experience with Wikis
What is my personal experience in collaborating with Wikis?
What shall I say more than that I haven’t worked with Wikis at all. In the course of the seminar I started to work with it for the first time. My problem with the Wiki is, that, in my opinion, it is not structured enough. Every time I visit our class Wiki I have to search for everything. There is so much information on one page that makes it difficult to overlook everything. I would like it better if everyone would mark his or her comment correct and open a new page for the comment. I don’t like scrolling the whole page up and down until I’ve read everything.
How would I use Wikis for language teaching?
I would use Wikis as we do it in another seminar called Current American issues, where our teacher gives us a short text. The text includes several questions and there are several words linked. We have to answer the questions and fill the blank links to the words. This is quite useful. Still there is too much information to get a good overview over a topic.
A better way for working with Wikis in the classroom would be the idea of writing a sort of history or a text. The teacher could write a short introduction and the students have to try to finish it. One could split the class up in groups of 3. Then they can finish the story together and discuss about grammar later on. In the end every group has a product that they can be proud of
Some sort of specific-subject-Wiki would be a good idea as well. The idea is to build up a big source for every student to look things up. (some sort of class wikipedia) A good example is the maths or history class. The students can try to contribute something to the Wiki to every topic in class. In the end of the class every student can print everything and has then an understandable maths,history(…) guide. This works for the language learning classroom as well. The students could create a Wiki related to the topic Great Britain or Australia or a grammar guide. There are so many possibilities.
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