Monday, December 15, 2008

#16 Wikis

The ideas of wikis are not new to me. I have heard about wikis and used wikipedia a bit myself from time to time. As an elementary teacher librarian it is an interesting issue -whether or not to use wikipedia when looking for information. On one hand, sometimes we can find information using wikipedia that we cannot find on official websites. Yet, because the information is from wikipedia we do not know for certain that it is accurate since anyone can post things there. Elementary students are just trying to figure out how to evaluate websites so taking any website's word for things without knowing the background is not something we are trying to promote. I do think wikis are interesting for students to be aware of, and when my students did a project on biographies we ended up finding more useful information on some famous people on wikipedia than any other place.
The idea of using wikis to have students write a fact or two about a topic is very interesting to me. I think I could utilize this right now with my third grade group who are trying to find information on presidents.
After having looked at some of the example websites for the discovery exercise I liked that there was a collection of school websites on one wiki so that they could be easily accessed. As always, I think some of this has more opportunity to be used at a middle or high school level, but there are certainly some uses at the elementary level, too.

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