IV.+Wikispaces


 * Home * Introduction * Wallwisher * Google Docs * Wikispaces * Moodle * Conclusion * References *

=W I K I S P A C E S = by Jason Peglow

If a teacher needs a collaborative tool that students can use inside and outside of the classroom, allows students to edit and communicate with each other, and still allows that teacher to oversee and monitor student progress, then Wikispaces is a valuable web 2.0 tool that wll provide all those options. [|Wikispaces]

According to the free online encyclopedia site Wikipedia (2010), a wiki ( /'wiki/ WIK-ee) is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used to create collaborative wiki websites, to power community websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and in knowledge management systems.
 * So, what is a wiki anyway? **

My wife introduced me to this site after she used it in her science classes for a group project. Having been very involved with several other web 2.0 tools already I chose not to put much attention towards it. However, my family (parents, brothers, sisters, and other relatives) who are now scattered all over the U.S. decided to have a big week long family reunion at a neutral site. After trying to plan some of the events for the week over emails, I remembered my wife's success story with Wikispaces and suggested we use it to help coordinate the trip. Since its inception, our family reunion wiki has taken off and everyone (including our computer illiterate parents) have collaborated, planned, created, and established a brilliant wiki and what looks like a promising family reunion/vacation.
 * Why Wikispaces? **

What makes Wikispaces so useful in the classroom is that it doesn't have to be used in the classroom. If a group project is assigned, students can login at home and continue working on their own time when it is most convenient for them. The teacher can still monitor what is happening no matter when it is used keeping this collaborative educational tool safe from inappropriate use. The teacher creates all logins and passwords so, unlike google docs, the student doesn't even need to have an email account. "Wikis can be a very useful addition to any classroom. They are engaging to students, easy to use, and focus on literacy whenever students genuinely interact with them" (Morgan & Smith, 2008).
 * How is Wikispaces valuable? **


 * How does Wikispaces work? ** (leelefever, 2007)

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According to Professors P. Craig McIntosh and Debbi Weaver (2008), who conducted a small research project on fostering student collaboration, stated the major downfalls to using Wikispaces were the difficulties in setting up the spaces for all the students (p. 618-619) and the tentativeness of the students to engage in the project due to a lack of understanding what they were actually supposed to do on the site and the use of this tool "was not enough to counteract some students' preference for working alone rather than as part of a team" (p. 621). Also having worked with both Wikispaces and Google Docs, I found that Google Docs new "real-time" improvements made collaborating in real time and seeing each other's edits live made the site feel much more interactive and collaborative. The isolation of a Wikispaces document requires one person to edit a page at a time even though anyone with access can edit it.
 * What are the disadvantages of Wikispaces? **

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