Wiki wonderland!
So I discovered wikis at a leadership institute for language teachers in Iowa in 2006. Of course, my students had no idea I knew what a wiki was because when I returned to BV last year, I did not start using wikis with students. I had created several wikis to enhance teacher collaboration and the sharing of information and resources on specific topics and I knew I wanted to use them with students for the same purposes.

You are probably asking yourself, "What is a wiki?" No fear...I'll explain and then I'll follow my explanation with a really great video from the folks at CommonCraft. A wiki is part of web2.0. Web 2.0 content is generally content that allows users to interact with a web site, usually by contributing, editing, or otherwise changing what is on a web site, often in real time. Businesses use wikis to facilitate project management when meeting in person is impractical. All members of the team can upload their pieces of the project and everyone else can see and comment on what has been accomplished while also uploading their own portions. If you'd like to learn more about wikis, check out this cool video.

Anyway, I finally decided that it was time to introduce my students to wikis, but as is my style, I jumped in with both feet, and all of the rest of me. If I was going to try wikis with students, then I was going to go all out...multiple wikis, with different purposes for all of my students.

So now, all students are working on paperless culture projects. All of their research will be uploaded to their class culture wikis so we can all visit their pages and learn from what they studied. French 3 and 4 also have epals in Belgium, but rather than email, we're corresponding on the wiki. The students love it because they can see what everyone is writing and they can write to everyone, not just to their epal (and I can track what they're writing by going to one web site rather than opening individual emails). French 4 is also collaborating on a wiki to share their growing knowledge of solar energy with others and they're even beginning to blog on their thoughts regarding Burkina Faso Solar Project on that wiki (I'm blogging there too).

The wiki provides authentic opportunities to communicate in French, cultural connections to other French speakers who are joining our wikis, and an easy way to collaborate with others on projects without being in the same room or even working online at the same time. Since none of my students had yet used a wiki, some "all together" practice was necessary. But now, they're all getting the hang of it and updating their various pages from home or from the library. Even students without internet at home are participating, in fact I consider it more critical that they participate. Their lack of internet at home should not be keeping them from working with current technologies. Although technology will always evolve, and wikis will one day be replaced with something else, students' ability to adapt will be critical to the workplace, and adaptation requires numerous experiences from which to build.