For Teachers:

This section is aimed at teachers, with information on using a wiki in the classroom. Hopefully there will be lots of advice and good information here soon.

Why use a wiki

A wiki is a website designed for collaborative writing. The largest, most well known wiki is Wikipedia. Using a wiki with ESL students encourages collaboration, content-focused writing, and editing skills. Being able to see their work as a part of a larger whole can also be a fun and exciting motivation for students, as well. For an excellent and brief introduction to wikis as used in the ESL classroom, I would recommend reading Critical Review: Collaborative Writing With A Wiki by Doe-Hyung Kim.

How to use a wiki

Wikidot has posted a good guide to their wiki syntax here. There will also be tutorials posted in each of the different student sections. The best way to learn, however, is to jump right in! You could start by writing a profile page like mine if you'd like, or you could add a ghost story. I recommend reading through the student guides as well if this is something new to you.

How to mark wiki contributions

There are three main types of changes that students will make to wiki pages:

  1. Adding content. Students may add new words without changing any existing words. These are likely to be the first contributions you see, as students create pages and are still uncomfortable deleting or changing existing content.
  2. Reorganizing. Students may simply move things around on a page (changing an introduction, or reordering elements on a page) without adding or deleting content.
  3. Grammatical editing. These types of changes are likely to be among the last students will make, for a number of reasons. However, as they become more confident with the wiki format and with editing the work of their peers, these changes will increase in frequency.

Using these three types of changes as a basis for a marking scheme is further discussed in Mak & Coniam (2008).1 I would recommend giving the most points for adding content, but giving enough points to the second two categories that students are still encouraged to edit. It is difficult to find an appropriate balance in marking this type of work. Work with your students to develop a clear rubric.

Parts of this wiki

This wiki has three main sections: the lesson section, the ghost stories index, and the forum.
Lessons:
The lesson section starts with an introduction to using a wiki for students, and includes an activity to help them to increase their fluency in the wiki syntax. There are also some readings unique to the Student section. Before starting the writing task or reading through the ghost stories section, students should work through this tutorial section as a class.
Ghost Stories:
This section contains the "meat" of the wiki. It is where students will publish their work, read the work of others, and where the most content is found.
Forum:
Students will be able to ask questions and get answers from their peers and their teacher here. Hopefully having this section will help make the wiki more dynamic and encourage students to spend more time on the page.


Another similar project I have found online can be found here. Eerie Tales has already had some content added by its members, primarily EFL students from the Philippines and Singapore.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License