Wiki's In Education

I have been looking at all different types of Web 2.0 tools in the past few weeks. I think the idea of using wiki's in education can be a great tool, although, I worry about abuse by students. (Erasing work, changing answers and pages, etc...) I know I am sounding a little paranoid, but I know my kids..in my classes.. and I wonder if they can be responsible. (I know it comes with good teaching and preteaching the proper etiquette) I only have 12 weeks with them, and once they finally get the jist of what I am trying to accomplish in the classroom, it is time for them to move out.

I did sit in on a wonderful webinar on edtechtalk two weeks ago that was about students from the horizon2008 project. This horizon2008 project is set up on a wiki. It was wonderful to talk to the students on the chat feature as well as to listen to them through iTunes and the live channel to hear the talk. The webinar was wonderful and gave me some more reason to try a wiki in my classroom. The students were from the Baccalaureate School for Global Education (BSGE), New York City, and Madeline Brownstone is their teacher. She is working with another co-teacher to work on this project with her students. The students are excited about collaborating on this project with students from all over the country, as you can see on the website. The students were so well versed and looking forward to working with the other students as well. They will be using ning, a social networking system to connect with the other students involved in the project. They first use ning to just get to know each other and then comes the collaborating!

I would like to use one of the wiki's that are password protected like our wetpaint and I also logged onto the free wiki Jeff gave us. I am concerned a little bit about using the wiki with my students because I am not sure how the district would feel about it. I think if we keep the kids names out of it and no pictures, it should be fine.

While learning about wiki's and preparing for my final capstone project at Plymouth for my MEd., I have gathered up a bunch of articles and blogs to try to support the theory that using a wiki in the classroom would promote literacy and further develop my technology curriculum.

Here are a few I found so far to help with my cause:
Research proving Wiki's are more efficient than email: http://tinyurl.com/4d8jxk
Wiki Collaboration leads to happiness: http://tinyurl.com/3dzn24
Eduwikis: http://eduwikius.wikispaces.com/
Wiki Educator: http://www.wikieducator.org/Main_Page

Wiki's seem to be a great way to create a beautiful web page, that can be used to collaborate with others. All of the people I find on Twitter seem to house their web blogs or websites on a wiki. I will give it a go, and update this page to let you know how it goes. Right now we use Moodle in the classroom, but it is not "open" to the world. It is contained. My dream is to collaborate with others from all over the world with a wiki and my students! Let's see if dreams come true.