Thing 10: Wikis

I find Wiki's more interesting than thing 9. This could have some uses in the media center, maybe with book reviews as was displayed in one of the examples.

I did edit the 23 things on a stick Wiki. I added the following under "content suggestions:"

Another great tool

For those people who have website development skills, Google offers a neat tool to insert a Google-powered search engine into any existing webpage. It simply requires creating a Google account, go to more tools and click on custom search. http://www.google.com/coop/cse/ This allows you to create a search engine for whatever pages you want. We used it to search our school's webpage. Once the search is created, copy and paste the code into your page. It works very well. This may be more advanced, but I can see some people really liking it. For 23 things on a stick, the search could be pasted into the blog.

The whole wiki idea lends itself to an interesting dilemma. It's something that we adults do all the time--give and take information to form our own conclusions. The questions is: do kids have these skills? I'm not sure they do, so the next question is this: How do we equip kids with these skills? That's probably our biggest challenge.

Our English department bans Wikipedia as a cited source for research papers. I don't disagree with this, but I've come to find "good" uses for it in the research process. I've built Wikipedia into my research lessons, so kids can learn how to use it well. I have them use it to gain a general understanding of a topic and to find search words and subtopics. I find that Wikipedia is so well organized and easy to understand that it is the best tool available for providing students with this pre-researching information. Once they have gained this understanding, they are better equipped to use the subscription databases, books, etc. to find highly credible information. I also tell them this is a good starting point for finding web links. While not all the links are good, they are better than doing a general Google search because people obviously felt strongly enough about these sites to list them. They are generally better than average.

I'm very intereted in finding a way to add a library wiki to my website at school. that will be one of my goals.