Wakato Academy

Wiki's

Have you heard about the newest thing in Internet collobartion, its called Wiki's.   I just found out about this cool new way to communicate via the internet.  I had heard about Wikipedia, even used it a few times.  But it never occured to me that I could use Wiki's for my own personal use.  Well I have just discovered these cool new tools and I am imagining all the great ways that these could be used in a homeschool setting.

One of the first ways we are going to try using them is with our First Lego League group.  They often have to work on programming and robot designs outside of class but until know they didn't have a practical way to share those ideas with each other.  By setting up a Wiki they can easily create, share and edit as they work through the challenges together. 

Basically there are several services that offer free Wiki's and there similiar to having an editable webpage.  You have the option to set them as public or private so only those you invite can view and edit them.  

Once you have your account set up you create your document by choosing edit at the top of the page.  Then you invite the rest of your friends/group members to the wiki.  Once there they can each get on and edit the page and then save it again so the next person coming sees the changes and can add more changes or revisions and so on until the group has a finished project.

So how are we going to use these in our group, well the plan at this point is to give each of the kids there challenges and then set up a round robin where each person in the group logs in on a particular day and works on the assignment and so on around the group until they have what they think is a polished answer to the challenge. 

I'll let you know how it goes but in the mean time you can check them out at www.pbwiki.com and dream about how you might use them in your homeschool or even in your daily life.  Me and dh are using one too to help keep track of we are at on various projects were working on.