Monday, September 17, 2007

Easy Wiki for Kids


Wikis are great tools for schools. I've put in more than a few posts on wikis. The main problem for using a wiki for younger kids is that they have to learn an odd syntax to make the page. And making a nice looking page is quite a challenge. PikiWiki is more oriented to multimedia and to drag-and-drop editing. This is a system which younger students can use. It's also free.

T

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a very user friendly way to create a wiki; I can see my primary grade students using it for various projects.

Thane said...

Please let me know if you use it and what your experiences are. I find that most interesting projects often have one limitation which prevents it from being used for my classes.

T

Alecia Berman-Dry said...

Hi there. I tried using this wiki for a school project and found it definitely more userfriendly than wikispaces, but S-L-O-W. It took forever for pages to load...nevermind if you try to use tables, which I feel is a basic of Web design that kids need to learn. So, it's got a great gui look and feel, but as of now it's tediously slow to use.

Thane said...

Alecia,

Did they load slow for blank or pages with text? I've often found that easy to use system are slower because students are able to load photos, video and other "heavy" content.

==Thane

Alecia Berman-Dry said...

Hi Thane. It's slow overall and in general. It just seems as if they need more bandwidth, or something of that ilk. We are using it with our entire faculty at this time to collaborate on an international festival project. We post all our resources on a collective page so that they can be resued by teachers with that "country" in coming years. I will admit that it's graphics-heavy. Here's a link: www.wearetheworld.pbwiki.com. We're also using it with second graders for a colonial america project.