Educational Uses of Wikis
- Collaborative writing: groups build one shared document
- Class knowledge base: students add definitions, examples, and links per topic
- Project-based learning: a long project recorded and revised over weeks
- Peer review: students read and improve each other’s writing
- Teacher collaboration: a shared bank of lesson plans and resources
- Living syllabus: students add current readings and links to the course outline
A wiki suits any task where students write, edit, and link work together over time. The six uses below cover most of what a class will do with one. Each works because the wiki keeps the content in one shared place and records who changed what.
They rely on shared, editable pages and a saved history of every change.
Students build and revise the same content together, and the teacher can see who did what.
Collaborative writing
Students work together to produce a single document. Each student can add a section, fix an error, or improve a paragraph someone else wrote.
Example: a biology class divides into groups. One group writes the page on the digestive system, another on the respiratory system, and a third on the circulatory system. By the end of the unit, the class has a shared wiki on human body systems that no single student could have built alone.
Class knowledge base
The teacher sets up a wiki where students add definitions, examples, diagrams, and links for each topic on the syllabus. The pages grow into a study reference the whole class can use before a test.
Example: in an ICT course, students add pages for “Internet Safety”, “Search Engines”, “Email Etiquette”, and “Digital Citizenship”. Each page links to the others, so a student reading one topic can follow a link to a related one.
A set of linked pages where students collect definitions, examples, and resources for each topic.
It grows through the term and becomes a shared study reference the class can revise from.
Project-based learning
Wikis are useful for long projects. Students record their progress, upload resources, and revise the work over weeks instead of handing in one final file at the end.
Example: students studying local water pollution build a wiki with photos, interviews, data tables, causes, effects, and proposed solutions. The wiki becomes the project report, and the version history shows how the group’s thinking changed along the way.
Peer review
Students read and improve each other’s writing on the wiki. Because every edit is logged, the teacher can see who gave feedback and who acted on it. This builds careful reading and editing skills that students rarely practise on a private assignment.
Teacher collaboration
Wikis are not only for students. A team of teachers can run a wiki to share lesson plans, schemes of work, assessment rubrics, and resource banks. When a teacher leaves the school, the wiki hands the next teacher a complete record of the materials instead of a gap.
A shared staff wiki for lesson plans, schemes of work, rubrics, and resources.
The history means a departing teacher leaves a full record the next teacher can pick up.
Living syllabus
A teacher can put the course outline on a wiki. As the term goes on, students add links to current news, extra readings, or related videos. The syllabus stays current instead of sitting as a fixed file that no one reopens.
A wiki brings real advantages and real risks, and it is not the right tool for every task. Read on for the benefits and challenges of using wikis, and then when to use a wiki instead of a blog or a portfolio.
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