Set up an educator's account with a wiki site like PB Works. When researching a wiki to utilize in your classroom, the primary thing you want to look for is its ease of use. Complicated sites will only confuse your students and make your life more stressful as the semester wears on. A second thing to look for is whether the wiki free to use and, if it is, how many available features you'll have access to by using a free account. You'll also need to consider how many students can participate at a time without having to purchase a user license.
Decide which types of assignments you'll want your students to utilize in your wiki workspace. Since many students don't like to speak up in class, wikis can provide you with an avenue for facilitating class discussions among your students. The anonymity and distance involved in engaging in an online discussion is far more comfortable to many students than having a face-to-face discussion with the professor or other classmates in front of the entire class. Other possible uses of the wiki include creating group projects, building a collaborative set of shared notes for the class and even allowing students to share web pages with classmates.
Share materials with students as part of your ongoing communications with the class. Students sometimes feel as if their professors are only available in the classroom. A wiki account gives you the opportunity to continually update your class and share important materials that you want students to read or view. These can include web pages, video, lecture notes, PowerPoint presentations and any other form of digital presentation you can think of to share with the class.
Integrate your wiki workspace into any distance education courses that you teach. You can utilize your workspace in such a way that it becomes its own social networking tool for your course. Rather than using traditional social networking sites, your wiki workspace allows you to control what students can see and do as part of the group. You can collaborate with all your distance education students in multiple classes at the same time and thus increase your communications efficiency.