A wiki is different from a blog in that I feel a wiki is more of a community/collaborative site. From my experience I feel that more thoughts and ideas can be shared with a wiki. If a parents or someone else wanted to leave a comment on your blog page they would have to log on. For the wiki site, they could type you an email. Again this is based off what I know. It could be different but I would rather communicate on a wiki page. Also, a wiki page can have several different pages so that the teacher could let each child have a page. Unlike a blog, a wiki has the history tab which lets you see who edited the page and when. This is a great way to see if and track students working on an assignment that they were given.
In my classroom, the students use the wiki to go to math practice sites, accelerated reader, spelling city and view class pictures. They also can go to snapgrades and view their grades in my class.
Some problems that could occur could be that I would have to monitor comments and postings of my students. It would also require lots of individual help which I'm not sure I could fit into my computer time. I could get around this by doing activities that students could follow along step by step as I do them. It may require a few computer class periods but I think I could manage and each time the students would be more confident in using wikispaces.
Kristine, I have also thought about giving each student their own wiki page. I just worry about students giving too much information on the wiki and parents getting upset. Amy B. suggested we give them "pen" names. Let me know if you decide to give them each a page on your wiki. I would be interested in talking about how you would do it.
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