Thing 8: Wikis

After looking at a few Wikis, I like the setup for a lot of the pages, especially the Educational Wikis. I thought it was really convenient having a plethora of Wikis at one location which would give teachers a lot of resources. Also, I liked how the Educational Wikis were Wikis from all over the world and not just from our country. I think it is important to see what other countries are teaching and to have access to those ideas. It was also interesting to me that some of the Wikis you had to request access to as opposed to being a public website. I think that limits the amount of people that you are going to have accessing your Wiki, but at the same time I'm sure some of these Wikis (like the Bull Run Library) has a specific reason for only allowing members to enter the site.

The one thing that I do not like about Wikis is that they are editable. I think that this makes the Wikis less credible, which would make me cautious about allowing my students to use information that they found on a Wiki. I think that depending on the specific Wiki will depend on how credible the source can be, but again with Wikis being editable you can have incorrect information on them. I would only trust a Wiki source that was not editable, or that had a moderator who was approving the edits before they posted.

Overall, I don't use Wikis in my classroom as I don't always trust them and would like to have more credible sources used by both myself and my students.