Wiki Wiki (Which Apparently Means "Quick") Who Knew?

I read the chapter on Wikis and had to check them out.  Of course I've looked at Wikipedia before but I've never actually tried to edit anything and I've always convinced my students that Wikipedia is the worst place ever to find information.  Now I'm not so sure.  I started out by checking out one of the links that I found in Will Richardson's book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, Wikijunior.  I really like the idea of having a set of "books" that are published for younger children, sometimes published by children.  In fact, I found a topic that my students

have just completed some work on and found that they had information that could be added to the wiki.  If I knew how.  Wikijunior's editing does not seem as user-friendly as I thought it would be.

Because I'm a newbie at wikis, I went off to search for an alternative to Wikipedia and its friend (Wikijunior).  Wikispaces was another place that Richardson had mentioned, so I headed there in an effort to find something user-friendly and classroom-friendly.  Wikispaces seems like place.  It seems like the perfect place to allow my students to become published authors in an more academic format than using a blog.  I'm seriously considering the use of wikispaces to produce a class page of information regarding Westward Expansion and the Civil War (two of our biggest units in Social Studies).  I can already imagine how excited my students will be when they can view their work online and show it off to others.

This video (and the others included on the wikispaces site) is going to be really useful when it comes time to make a wiki: