Wikis can be utilized to allow students and their teachers to interact and engage with one another in a manner that can’t be as fully achieved by other means. Once teachers set up pupils with a Wiki, students then add their work to the website, where the teacher accesses and reads it. The teacher is then able to critique and monitor the work of students, for example, by providing feedback on a student’s latest Wiki entries. The student then respond to this feedback through the Wiki.
When a group of students is given a problem solving task, a Wiki can be effectively utilized as a means of collaboration for the group. The students use the Wiki as a focus for their ideas and discussions. Since the Wiki fosters a sense of community and provides a nexus for thoughts on the topic at hand, students will hopefully reach a satisfactory conclusion to their work more efficiently than without the Wiki.
A Wiki provides a communal area for both students and teachers to share knowledge they have. This sharing doesn’t have to relate to a specific task or assignment. The teacher can encourage students, when establishing the use of the Wiki, to add any interesting information to the website that they might find on a topic or to highlight issues they have encountered. This, in turn, fosters relevant discussions both through the Wiki website and in classroom lessons.
As part of the learning experience, teachers can encourage students to transfer elements of what they learned through lectures and classroom discussions into an article on the Wiki. The information is then available on the Wiki for other students to read and digest. More importantly, the writer reflects on what she learned on a topic by describing it on the Wiki. This reinforces the student’s learning experience.
Wikis can be updated easily and regularly. Once a student is introduced to the website, Wikis become a readily accessible method of collaborating with others and contributing to a project. This concept of regular use serves an educational purpose if teachers ask students to add content to the Wiki in the form of a log or diary. This log provides an accompaniment to a project the class is working on, or even to a conference.