My First Experience with Wiki Creating

Before I even got started with my sessions this week, I glanced through the week, as I normally do, to get a feel for what I should expect. The wiki assignments caught my attention, so I began browsing them right away. I watched the short YouTube video, and I got pretty excited. So far, I haven't really had any experience with wikis outside of my occasional Wikipedia exploration. I loved the idea of collaborating together to gather and share information. Aside from the potential educational use, I thought right away of creating a wiki for my church. Besides, I thought it would be good practice (which it was).

I spent the next three hours creating a wiki to be used in my church. Quick demographics: we are a smaller church that meets on the west side of Lansing. Although it is a fairly close-knit environment, we generally don't spend much time together apart from our once-a-week services. Like everyone else, we are busy with work, school, kids, and various other activities. I took one look at the format and realized that this would be a great way for us to connect and share our ideas on a regular basis. I linked a google spreadsheet with a directory that I had already been working on. I also linked the main website for our church, along with a "contributors' page," where I thought that we could create individual pages to share encouragement, or whatever we wanted to share. I loved the feature that I found on the pages in Google wiki. It was like a mini-blog that I added onto my page in order to post chronological events. I opted to make that wiki (and share it with some of the members in my church as I try to promote it) instead of contributing to the Idea Exchange for the EduTech Program. I would, however, be interested in looking into that potential. Here is a quick screenshot of the wiki that I made for my church (it's private, so no link...sorry):

After creating the wiki (and marvelling at my amazing work, lol), I decided to go ahead and edit a page on Wikipedia. I am not teaching, so I chose the district where my kids attend, I've worked in the past, and I'm currently volunteering. I decided against creating a page for the school where I volunteer, and instead I edited the high school page, updating some of the information that I saw that was outdated regarding a high school that they closed last year. Here is a screenshot of the editing I did, along with a screenshot of the page after editing:

Next, I decided to create a wiki for teachers, students, or even parents to potentially contribute to that would generate pages of learning and activities that students could refer to over the summer. It has pages for summer reading lists (according to grade level), writing activities, science experiements, fun and games, and staying active. Here's a link for the wiki that I began: https://sites.google.com/site/elementarysummer/.

I love the idea of wikis, and I just really hope that as teachers and even community members, we will take advantage of all of the wonderful opportunities provided by use of the technology.