Setting up a Class Wiki: My Personal Experience
Before I got to understand what a class wiki was, I started using it while being part of an online class. I might have mentioned this before, but I took a class about Web tools with the University of Oregon. Part of the class projects and homework was posted on the class wiki at sites.google.com. After this first encounter I wonder how I could start one for one of my classes, and my Web Professor –Deborah Healey- gave me the answer and some basic instructions to set it up.
By using sites.goole.com I discovered that I was able to create different pages and wikis for my classes. However, since I got into wikis, I have kept only one for my Reading Skills 2 courses. The reason for this relies on the fact that I use it to post my students’ email addresses, their reading projects in blogs and glogs (This is something new, like my new acquisition to Web tools for my class.), and any other reading homework for them to complete.
Having a class wiki has lots of advantages. As a university professor it does give me good control over students’ projects to keep track of their progress and to grade them when the deadline has come. As for my students, logging into the wiki allows them to comment on their peers’ projects, exchange points of view –in class or online- about what they are doing and the way they have done it. All this can be done by grating them permission to access the wiki page by means of their Gmail accounts. (I decided to use sites.google.com because all of them have the chance to use www.blogger.com as well.)
As you can see, my class wiki has served its purpose since the very beginning. I have not tried to use it as a place to edit works implying having students working all of them at the same time. I guess I have to give it a try. And if you feel like taking a look at my present class wiki for Reading Skills 2 visit it at the following address: https://sites.google.com/site/bin08readingskillsiiiii2010/. After that, please give me your feedback.
Jonathan Acuña
Universidad Latina
Costa Rica
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