Wikis and Wikipedia

The concept of using Wikis is pretty new to me. After learning about it, I believe that it is one of the best Internet-based tools a teacher can use in the classroom. It not only promotes learning technology but also to work collaboratively. As we know one of the biggest wikis in the Internet is Wikipedia. Whether or not one can trust the information in Wikipedia has been quite a dilemma. As educators we want to make sure our students are provided with the proper information and to make sure they find valid academic sources in the Internet. Some will argue that Wikipedia is simply information put together by people who do not have a solid background on the subject and that often times it does not have enough support material. Others argue that most information is checked, edited, and updated continuously by thousands of people making it more reliable. The more I discover and learn about Wikipedia, I do support the fact that information is monitored quite frequently and successfully. I have seen this first hand when trying to add information to a Wikipedia page without citing any sources; the information was deleted seconds later. Over the years I have compared information on Wikipedia to other sources in the Web and I have yet to find a discrepancy. I do believe that if Wikipedia does ultimately provide reliable information, then it will become one of the best tools created for the Internet. It is amazing how it has become a "one stop shopping information paradise" where you can find information about almost any subject and the best thing is that you too can add your own piece of information to any of the pages. So after finding my school, the information that I added was that Anaheim High School's Yearbook will be celebrating its 100th Edition during 2012-2013. I am the current Yearbook Adviser and I thought this was necessary to add to the school's wiki page. The bottom line is that nowadays I do encourage students to use Wikipedia as an Internet resource, but I make sure they have another one to support the information.

MY WIKISPACE

It was a lot of fun creating my first Wiki using Wikispace. As I mentioned earlier, I am the current Yearbook Adviser at Anaheim High School, so I created a wiki page where Editors and myself can exchange information throughout the year. This will be a trial period since it is the first time any of us are using a wiki. Eventually, if this goes well I will like to set up one where the whole class shares information and ultimately I will like to create each one of my Biology classes. It is going to be exciting using wikis!