Wikis can be incredibly beneficial to use in a classroom for multiple reasons. Developing a wiki creates a wonderful opportunity for students or teachers to work together and grow as team members. With a wiki, collaborating on each different element of the website is required. Creating a wiki allows each student to have one area or page to complete, and therefore encourages all students to cooperate and pull his or her own weight. Having this area of specialization gives the student a responsibility and accountability for the rest of the group that is absent in many group project. Wikis also allow for a great deal of creative freedom that many students yearn for in each lesson, while also giving them experience in a form of technology many students may have never used. With wikis we as teachers allow students to express their ideas and visions while also sharing ideas with their peers.
As we worked in teams with our fellow pre-service teachers to create our wikis, teachers in a school can work together to create a wiki. This wiki assignment was particularly help to the participants because working with colleagues and administrators as a team is a constant part of being an educator. The reality is this sort of technologically intensive assignment is that sharing responsibilities, communicating ideas, and making decisions as a group is rarely easy; yet as teachers, whether we want to or not, we must learn how to make collaboration work.
One interesting feature my participant group covered in our Taylor County Middle School wiki is a brief description of the R & R Program on the "School Information" page. The Respect and Responsibility Program, often called R & R, is a program offer by TCMS the rewards students for good behavior and grades by sponsoring trips to movies, dances, etc. This reward is an effective incentive for students to improve their performance at TCMS.
