Thing 10 - Create Your Own Wiki

I did it!

This "thing" that took me so long to work through is now a valid and useful tool ready to go. It took much longer for me to learn about wikis, their uses, read examples, etc. than it took to make my own. It was very easy to make a wiki. I am not sure how much time it takes to manage a wiki but making one was not hard at all. My district is adopting a new Spanish 1 textbook in the fall. I created a wiki for all secondary Spanish language staff in my district based on the new textbook. I organized the wiki with a page for each chapter, personalized the appearance, and invited all of the Spanish language teachers from the three high schools in my district. I created a private wiki. Ideally, we will use this site as our main contact for collaboration instead of trying to send e-mails to the 17 teachers involved. If all of the teachers can work through the learning curve that I am processing this wiki will:

• Allow us to share our ideas for this new text
• Report on successes with its adoption
• Advise about any pitfalls we experience.
• Keep our best practices available to all Spanish teachers
• Eliminate isolation
• Ensure that the same education is available to all students in our district

I plan to start with a staff oriented wiki, learn how to manage it, and hopefully transfer these skills to wikis that I can use with my students.