My school is part of a merger with some other programs in our district. We are three small schools/programs and we will be merging both our programs and our physical space in September. The transition is occurring over a very short time-frame and there are a lot of details to work out between now and September.
Fork / Merge by Sam Grover Licensed CC BY-NC 2.0
Fork / Merge by Sam Grover Licensed CC BY-NC 2.0
As there are staff in three different buildings who are involved in this transition,I thought using a wiki to share ideas and to plan would be a good idea as our face-to-face meetings will be rather limited. I pitched the idea to my principal and he was keen to give it a whirl.
I chose to set up the wiki on Wikispaces. I have accounts on a number of wiki providers,but I chose Wikispaces because it is very easy to set up and I thought it would be straightforward for my colleagues to use.
It’s been interesting to see the activity on the wiki. Some folks started posting right away while it took a few weeks before others took up the invitation to become members. I suspect that the folks for whom this was a brand new experience were reluctant to sign up for an account and dive in. As more and more info was posted on the wiki and discussions were taking place there,there was more of a draw to be a part of it.
A month after starting the wiki almost all of the staff at the affected programs have joined,and everyone who has joined has posted info or participated in the discussions. I hope that as our face-to-face meetings start to ramp up,the wiki will still be a place to go to post ideas while they are still fresh in our minds. There was definitely more activity on the wiki directly after our last face-to-face meeting.
I’ve taken a few short courses on using wikis and I’ve puttered about with them,but I’ve never used them with students or with colleagues before now. Setting up this wiki has allowed me to see the full potential of using wikis not as glorified web pages,but as real collaborative spaces. We’ve been using the discussion feature,myself and others have subscribed to the wiki in Google Reader so that we receive notifications when changes are made,and we’re learning together how to use the various features of the wiki.
Have you used wikis before? If so,what has your experience been?
Hi Claire!
Great to see that your experience with using a wiki has been so positive and that your colleagues are embracing it as a communication tool. I have been using a wiki for my French course but mostly to share resources with the students that extend what we are learning in our online classes. I’ve also used a Clustr map to see whether students are using it. I share the same links in our Edmodo course site. However,I find Edmodo challenging to navigate,especially if a lot of content is already posted.
I think Wikispaces is great for collaborating as it has the functionality of a website but allows you to restrict who can edit the pages and lets you have discussions. I wouldn’t be as open to using this tool if I didn’t have ability to control who can edit as I’d be concerned about it being misused (content deleted,malicious links shared).
Hi Bernadette,
Yes,being able to restrict access to the wiki has been good. We’ve also made the wiki private so that only members can view and edit pages which seemed to make sense for this particular project. With students it might be a good option to keep the wiki ‘locked down’until they get used to working on it and have their netiquette down.
Cheers,
Claire
[...] (physical and human) and so be able to provide better services for our students. (I wrote here about using a wiki to help pool ideas about this transition.) It is a big shift though and there [...]
[...] As my program becomes amalgamated with a couple of other district programs (see posts on this here and here) I hope that together as a team we can come up with a common purpose that we can all agree [...]