April 2008 — News
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Spotlight: Free Social Media Tools for Educators
3. Wikis
Wikispaces offers free services for teachers who want to host classroom wikis, including the ability to create private wikis viewable and editable only by members of the teacher's group. (This feature normally costs $5 per month.) Wikispaces is looking to give away 100,000 such education-oriented wikis for K-12 users.
PBwiki is another free wiki space site that takes the needs of K-12 educators into consideration--including privacy settings, but also with case studies and white papers covering the use of collaborative tools in education. As the site says, you use PBwiki when you're "tired of waiting for Brad in IT to help set you up."
Wikibooks is a collection of educational textbooks freely available for use (including printing). Textbooks are available in a wide range of subjects, from arithmetic to calculus, psychology to linguistics, introductory chemistry to astrophysics. It also includes various professional development resources, study aids, and a special Wikijunior section for finding books aimed at younger learners.
And then there's the granddaddy of all wikis: Wikipedia. Yes, I know nobody has ever not heard of WIkipedia. But I'm listing it here because I think it needs some defense in light of well intentioned teachers and university professors banning its use. Let me put it bluntly: Wikipedia is not your enemy. The enemy is laziness--the same laziness that, in the olden days, resulted in students regurgitating passages out of family encyclopedias or dictionaries or school textbooks. Wikipedia, like every other source, does afford students the opportunity to take the lazy approach. But unlike most other sources, Wikipedia facilitates exploration. It's expansive rather than reductionist. A topic doesn't sit there pat; it's the basis for further exploration. You can begin at
hypergiants, detour over to strings, and continue on to Bose-Einstein condensates in a few clicks. You can read up on some aspects of Frederick Douglass's life, then go off to read his works or click over to more information on abolitionist movements. It provides pathways for learning really unlike anything else up to the time of its creation.