How to make teenage students enjoy writing by using a wiki – ICTLT presentation
Caroline Tees from the British Council Singapore gave a great account of how she’s been using wikis for the past two years. She shared examples of her success in using wikis for:
- individual writing
- collaborative writing
- peer correction
- peer policing
- exam practice
- examples of good writing for our classes
- show off your students’ work to their parents
- correct and learn from common mistakes
The tool she’d used for this was 37 Signals’ Writeboard: which is a simple one-page wiki. It allows multiple authors and editors, version comparison and commenting, all the usual wiki stuff – but on one page: “just like a Word document”, Caroline explained.
Caroline took us step-by-step through the Writeboard set-up and then went on to show how easy it is to use. She added that this wiki tool was simpler to use than other online tools like blogs or more conventional wikis, (I reckon because each Writeboard is only a single page). Writeboard’s simplicity is its strength. Because of this, she explained, any teacher or student can get to grips with it quickly.
She gave some tips on what to watch out for when running a wiki writing activity:
- students misbehaving
- comments (Mother tongue, Singlish or target language?)
- difficulties with email invitations
She also gave tips on how to make it work:
- check the Writeboard regularly
- set very clear instructions
- photocopy screenshot with password
Here’s Caroline’s presentation:
Tags: ICTLT, Wikis
